Cordelia de Castellane has always had a flair for mixing the high and low. The fleamarket isn’t the first place that springs to mind when thinking of her singular style but, while walking through her home, it’s clear she treasures her second-hand finds the most. She says she developed her eye for design during childhood, when she split her time between her parents’ Paris apartment and a house in the Swiss mountains owned by her grandparents. ‘My mother was an interior decorator and taught me that there are no rules – you can mix modern with old,’ she says of her child-hood home, where Andy Warhol paintings hang alongside five-franc YSL posters.‘You can create great things when you invest time, regardless of whether you have money. It’s the same in fashion.’
A future in design was a natural path for de Castellane. As a teen, her summers were spent interning with her uncle, the designer and former assistant to Karl Lagerfeld, Gilles Dufour, in the Chanel atelier. She joined designer Emanuel Ungaro at 16, ‘picking pins’ off the workroom floor. Next came a job with Giambattista Valli, before she launched her own line of children’s clothing and later took the helm of Baby Dior and Dior Maison. ‘Style is what you have inside of you,’ she explains.
Nowadays, de Castellane splits her time between a country house in Oise in the north of France and an apartment situated in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, with her daughter, three sons and their father. ‘It’s a bit messy,’ she says bashfully, on opening the doors of the 17th-century building. ‘I wanted the house to be very cool and unpretentious,’ she adds– words that could also describe her approach to getting dressed. Contrary to the vision for the countryside château (‘The decor there is very delicate, with fabrics and flowers’), she wanted to create a more ‘town and bohemian’ feel in their city dwelling.
De Castellane bought the apartment in 2006 – ‘It started out with only two or three rooms’ – and over the years purchased the neighbouring properties to create a three-storey treasure-trove, with curved staircases connecting the kitchen level to the living rooms and bedrooms above. ‘It’s like a little doll’s house,’ she explains of the transformation, which she says happened quickly. ‘I have to be fast in the way I manage my work and create collections,’ she says, ‘so it’s the same for renovations.’
De Castellane’s La Cornue-designed stainless-steel kitchen serves as the epicentre of dining activity; a place where friends are permitted to smoke between helpings of homemade souflés, past and roast chicken served on Dior Maison’s La Colle Noire crockery. ‘When people come to my house, I want them to feel it’s easy-going. We keep adding food on the table, chocolate cake...everyone stays quite late,’ she says of wine-filled nights nestled between the Argile-painted wooden worktops (in the shade Noir de Rome) and Haruki Murakami artwork, overlooked by an assortment of miniature Russian dolls.
The living rooms are a testament to her fearlessness with clashing colour and fabric – their walls painted a muted green hue, the natural wooden beams a soft cream, Farrow & Ball’s Pointing. ‘Contrary to my love of a big kitchen, I like living rooms to be small and cosy,’ she says. ‘You can have more interesting conversations in a small room.’ An expansive collection of family heirlooms and artwork enhances the intimate feeling of the space. A Dutch table inherited from her mother’s Swiss relatives serves asa bar near the door. A modern Garouste & Bonetti mirror – an 18th-birthday present from her father – hangs above the replace, beneath the gaze of a Marc Quinn painting of Kate Moss.
De Castellane says she ultimately aims to make people feel at home in her apartment and tries to avoid anything ‘too decorated’. She adds: ‘A home should reflect who you are and how you live.’ This explains the myriad books that line her black book shelves and Madeleine Castaing marble tabletop (‘A house without books has no soul’), and vast oral displays sourced from her country garden and the Dior-favourite Parisian florist Eric Chauvin. ‘The apartment doesn’t have high ceilings, so when you have small rooms you have to play it big,’ she says.
Carla Llanos Tulips Print
SOHO HOME Sofia bouclé footstool 43cm
Dior Maison Water Glass Gold-Tone Cannage & Roses
Following years of scouring second-hand websites such as eBay and Selency as well as the stalls of Paris’ Paul Bert Serpette and Vanves fleamarket for homeware (‘You need to go at 6am to find amazing plates and napkins’), de Castellane’s home is a care-fully selected amalgamation of her eclectic taste – and a seamless extension of her personal style and work. ‘There are lots of things in a fleamarket, but you always find something. Similarly,Dior Maison isn’t for one person’s taste – it’s for everyone.’
This article appears in the February issue of ELLE UK, out now.
