Photo: Jean-François Jaussaud/NYT
Christian Astuguevieille, described by the New York Times as a "polymath" and "occupational dabbler," has spent time as artistic director at fashion and fragrance houses, as a sculptor, a furniture designer, and as an artist, wrapping household objects with boldly-colored rope. Though he spends much of his time in Paris, Astuguevieille maintains a house in Bayonne, France as what can only be described as an intentionally impractical workspace. The 13-room house lies around the corner from another he keeps in this Basque country town and as such is, as the NYT describes it, "a house that in no obvious way is arranged for comfort or for the intrusions of guests." Check outmore photos of this odd but beautiful space over at T magazine
The shaman’s lair is tucked into a stolid 19th-century building in a provincial city where two rivers meet at the heart of Basque country.
It is a four-story house built around an interior courtyard closed to the sky, 13 or so rooms — depending on who’s counting — with windows that mostly ignore views of bridges and slow-moving barges and an ambient riverine glow.
The occupant, Christian Astuguevieille, is one of those rare polymaths one encounters in the design world, an occupational dabbler who, resisting pigeonholes, made a name for himself over the past several decades as an artistic director of both fashion and fragrance houses and also as a sculptor, a furniture designer, a maker of jewelry and objects, and, not least, as the nose behind the fragrances produced by the Japanese design house Comme des Garçons.
It was not his work for Nina Ricci or Rochas or Hermès, though, that brought Astuguevieille to fame or that turned him into a figure whose work is passionately sought after by collectors like Delphine Krakoff, Nate Berkus, Philippe Starck or the Bottega Veneta designer Tomas Maier.
It was the curious and often spooky objects he began making in the 1980s. Inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi and also by furoshiki — the art of wrapping objects in cloth bundles — he started taking workaday objects and encasing them in cotton cord and hemp.
Rope, that ancient and obvious everyday material, brought Astuguevieille to renown with his first furniture exhibition at the Galerie Yves Gastou in Paris in 1989. The design world fell enthusiastically upon the chairs and consoles he encased in twined fiber and wrapped Astuguevieille in praise.
The adjectives used to characterize his objects are usually nautical. And while it’s true enough that they evoke hawsers and dock lines, they also appear to allude slyly to rope’s deeper symbolic meanings, the kind deployed by conjurers or Masons in their secretive rites.
Rope-wrapped objects are everywhere in Christian Astuguevieille’s house, one of two he maintains around a corner from each other in this ancient city. Tables are wrapped in the stuff. Its pliant undulant shapes flow across cabinets. Stiffened and tied into thick, knuckled knots, rope painted Yves Klein blue covers vases, robbing them of use while imbuing them with mystery.
“Altering and deforming the original use of things is important to me,” said the man who entombed a rotary telephone in a lacquered cloth bundle. Raising his brows from behind owlish eyeglasses, Astuguevieille permitted himself a rare smile. “I love to mystify.”
He does this whether creating furniture or producing so-called anti-perfumes intended to evoke the smell of sand dunes, mineral carbon, burnt rubber, rocks set afire or wash left to dry in the wind.
He certainly does it in a house that in no obvious way is arranged for comfort or for the intrusions of guests. There are chairs, but they tend to have ridges or antlers. There are piles of Creil-Montereau creamware collected over decades from the Paris flea market, yet since the designer seldom dines at home these are mainly for show. And although there are proper bedrooms — including one that Astuguevieille’s partner, Georg Dressler, occupies in cozy disarray — these seem like a necessary nuisance, an afterthought.
The purpose of the house is partly as retreat from the hubbub of Paris and the demands of an international career. More than anything else, though, the building on a quay named for a Napoleonic war hero exists as a multistory cabinet of curiosities, one in which the artist can conjure inspiration from the welter of objects he has collected over years of travel around the world.
It’s on Quai Commandant Roquebert and not in the narrow 17th-century frame house around the corner where he spends a great deal of his time that Astuguevieille can be alone with his collections of blank-eyed tribal masks from New Guinea; Indonesian batiks; hanks of horsehair; furoshiki bundles; Basque canes; Chinese baluster vases; Spanish market baskets; and the soft stitched sculptures he makes in forms reminiscent equally of Cycladic idols, Niki de Saint Phalle’s famous Nanas and Cabbage Patch dolls.
Near an antique stove, a bisque figure of a satyr stands sentry, one result of a years-long collaboration the designer undertook with the porcelain manufactory at Sèvres. A pillow artfully plopped atop his horns suggests the old goat may be suffering a gueule de bois, as a hangover is called in French.
“I am, essentially, a teacher,” said Astuguevieille, who, as the only child of an old and prosperous Protestant family, is a kind of reluctant sensualist, dressing only in black and white, often sockless and with Comme des Garçons sneakers. “I’m never interested in beauty for its own sake.” He once created a fragrance called Garage and gives the distinct impression of measuring out his pleasures with Calvinist restraint.
Even now, when a scent or a sculpture or a design under development starts deviating from his strict aesthetic guidelines, threatening to become too easy, seductive or beautiful, Astuguevieille stops all work, he said.
‘Beauty is too easy,” he said. His house doesn’t simply resemble a private temple — an inscrutable facade concealing a richly appointed sanctum sanctorum — but also literally incorporates one.
Christian Astuguevieille’s temple was constructed to his own design of solid chestnut by craftsmen at a workroom he maintains in Limoges and has a portico three columns wide, paneled sides made to imitate rusticated stone, several windows and a plank bench inside.
Placed within a courtyard where a timber cookhouse stood in earlier times, it is a haunting structure, visible only from the house’s inner windows, a place where a philosopher might sit in contemplation, or else a neo-Classical-style telephone booth built to receive calls from the spirit world.
Often, Astuguevieille presents an idea to Rei Kawakubo, the founder of Comme des Garçons (his latest fragrance for the label will be released later this month), and declares, “It’s a little bit crazy, what I’m doing here.”
To which Kawakubo will reply, “Yes, you are truly crazy, but that’s a good thing.”
While he is not, of course, crazy, Astuguevieille is nostalgic for a time when the sense world seemed richer. Thus, his is the dwelling of a man whose shock when talking about a recent school lecture he presented is sincere.
Handing a group of young students a sheet of white foolscap, he asked them to feel and crumple the paper and then describe the sensation, only to discover that they barely had words. “Children are increasingly so removed from the natural world that an entire vocabulary of the senses is in danger of being lost,” he said.
In his own boyhood, Astuguevieille hiked through vineyards outside the Provençal village where he lived, accompanied by an elderly friend of his father’s. Like many from a generation that predated mass migrations from the countryside to cities, the man was familiar with nature and could handily identify the trees and animals, the flowers and the richly varied smells.
Astuguevieille — himself educated at a Montessori school — explained to the students that if new words were required to describe the noisy rustle of crumpled paper, they should do as they might when texting and make some up.
“Yet they couldn’t, and so there is this feeling I have of emergency about passing this knowledge on,” said the designer. The point of his work, and of the house he has made in a city where the odors of the river rise up through the floorboards and where church bells clamor at all hours of the day, is a layering and manipulation of sense impressions. “All of my work is about creating new ways of experiencing the senses, whether it is with perfume or rope.”
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