Artists I Love: Meeting M. Matisse
Henri Matisse at Villa le Reve


Last summer, when I was chasing Picasso in Aix-en-Provence and Antibes, in the South of France, I also went in search of Henri Matisse in Nice and Vence.

Follow me on a rare trip—as I walk in Matisse’s footsteps, find the house where he painted so joyfully, and find insights into the artist’s sensual and richly detailed paintings of interiors and costumed models.




Henri Matisse is the supreme painter and stylist of interiors. I’ve always loved his vivid, sensual and superbly constructed paintings that conjure sunny Riviera rooms in languid eternal summer.

Most memorable are the gloriously seductive canvases he created in Vence in the forties, in a house called Villa le Reve. Come with me on a visit.


This past summer, I was most fortunate to spend time in the South of France. I followed Pablo Picasso, seeking his haunts and his paintings (check in THE STYLE SALONISTE archive for a feature on Picasso’s Chateau de Vauvenargues)—but I was also devotedly sleuthing the residences, studios and locations that inspired Henri Matisse.

I’ve always been drawn to the thrumming colors, the theatrically styled vignettes, the props and blooming flowers, open windows and palm trees shimmering in the sunlight, of Henri Matisse’s intensely personal paintings. These are canvases of sheer sensation, a vibration of the optic fibers, where the season is forever summer, the Mediterranean always glinting, and flowers radiant. It’s all emotion. You feel it immediately.

Matisse brought together his textiles, antiques, rugs, Moroccan pottery, plants, goldfish in bowls, flowers, fruit—and of course his seductive models—to create interior paintings of singular beauty. I wanted to be there. I wanted to look out the windows of these rooms. I wanted to experience the exuberant joy of these sunny and intensely romantic houses.





I conducted hours of research on Matisse in the south of France, and planned to follow his life around Nice and Cimiez, paying respects at the Matisse Museum, and especially trying to find his magical Villa le Reve on a hillside in Vence, where he lived and painted.

In 1943, with the war raging, seventy-four-year-old Matisse escaped from Nice to the relative safety of Vence, a hill town in a verdant and blossoming region a few miles above the Cote d’Azur. Hidden from the sunbathers and revelers, Vence had been a refuge for other famous painters, including Bonnard, Renoir, Dufy, Soutine, and Dubuffet, who had created some of their best art, inspired by the lush setting, the happiness-inducing limpid weather.



Matisse drove up to Vence from Nice, took one look at Villa Le Reve with its palm trees, orange blossom fragrance, and the chalky mountains rising protectively beyond the oleanders. The house had a certain air of privacy and detachment, and Matisse decided it would be his perfect refuge.

“Beautiful villa, and I don’t mean gingerbread or pretentious,” he wrote to his friend, the poet Louis Aragon in 1943. “Thick walls and glass doors reaching up to the ceiling. In other words, nice light.”

“The beautiful terrace had a large balustrade overflowing with variegated Roman ivy and lovely geraniums of hot colors that I did not know. The many lovely colors of the palm trees that filled the windows were enthralling” said Matisse, quoted by his son, Pierre.

Matisse shipped his props up from his former atelier, including Moroccan rugs, pewter vases, block-printed cottons and elaborate embroidered textiles, Chinese porcelains, shells, a small round wrought-iron table, tarnished silver pitchers, shells, slip-covered armchairs, a grand antique marble-topped table with baroque iron legs, Fez pottery and antique French pottery. These would all later appear in paintings of the interiors of Villa le Reve, in this period. Just outside his open windows he would be surrounded sun-struck oleanders and visions of the shimmering sea in the distance.

“When I realized I would see that light every morning, I could not believe my good fortune,” Henri Matisse wrote in a letter to the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, who collected his work.



At Villa le Reve, Matisse devoted his life to art, and painted every day. This is the artist at his most joyful, intense and expressive. After a day of painting he practiced the violin for an hour, dined lightly, and then early to bed.

I had always loved the scrumptious paintings Matisse created at Villa le Reve, with almost nude models in Moroccan ensembles draped on chaises, reclining models in North African robes, tables laden with kinetic garlands of flowers, and ravishing bowls of lemons and pomegranates in bright patches of sunshine. And always there were the open shutters, streaming light, and flickering palm trees looming at the windows.

“Sometimes when I pause over a motif, a corner of my studio that I find expressive, even if it is beyond me and my strength, I wait for the coup de foudre,” commented Matisse to his son, Pierre.




Among the artists who visited Matisse when he was living in Vence was Pablo Picasso, with his lover, Francoise Gilot.

“Of all the artists Pablo knew and visited during the years I spent with him, no-one meant quite as much to him as Matisse. At the time we made our first visit to Matisse, in February 1946, he was living in a villa called Le Reve, in Vence. Pablo had at least eight paintings by Matisse. The paintings are very successful in their color harmonies and very free and spontaneous. Matisse told me, “My thought in doing a painting is often a continuous non sequitur, a series of jumps from one mountain peak to another. It’s what you might call a somnambulist’s thought”– Francoise Gilot in ‘Life with Picasso’ (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Soon after I arrived in Nice (and had spent the morning at the Villa Kerylos), I was able to arrange at least to see the Villa le Reve, but I was told that it would most likely not be possible to go onto the property or enter the house.

I would be happy glancing through the wrought iron gates, I thought. Well, not really. I wanted to linger in the garden, smell the lavender and orange blossoms in Matisse’s garden, and look out of his windows, see his studio.

I drove into the hills, up winding roads framed with flourishing olive trees and jacarandas. I turned into the avenue where the house stands behind a high hedge. I could see it through the leaves as I pressed the buzzer on the gate. To my surprise, a woman walked out of the front door of the terra cotta stucco residence. It was the manager of the house, Joelle Audry.

“I am not sure if you can come in,” she said. “There is a group of Norwegian artists studying here. I’ll have to ask their instructor if it is OK.”

I could see several woman wearing straw hats working on oil paintings , their easels set out in the garden. I could see the teacher critiquing their work. Audrey spoke to her. The instructor nodded her head.

Audrey opened the tall iron gate. I walked into the garden. It was like entering the secret garden. The mingled fragrance of lavender, roses and oleander vibrated in the warm afternoon air. Palm trees glimmered in the sun. I felt uplifted, light-headed, a little giddy. Perhaps it was the heat. I think not.




Matisse’s house, painted the original terra cotta with faded turquoise shutters, stood two stories, overlooking the garden. Typical of these hill town houses, it has balconies from which to view the blue coast.

I imagined Matisse working there every day, diligently taking up his brushes and focusing on the light, the intense colors, creating beauty.

I walked across the lawn, and quietly asked the Norwegian art instructor, very delicately, if it might be possible to enter the house to see Matisse’s studio, holy ground. She nodded, smiling.

I walked into the house and felt Matisse’s presence. All of his paintings were in my head. I knew the placement of the windows, the way sun slanted across his mis-en-scene in the afternoon.


The reality is that the house today is managed by the local municipality, and may be rented by art groups. It has sleeping accommodations downstairs for art students.

Still, I could I see Matisse and his lissome models there among his antiques, brilliant flowers in every vase and Moroccan rugs strewn around.

A joyful Matisse painting I had seen recently of a woman sitting at a table, ‘The Silence Living in Houses’ offers a magical sense of the peace and power of this setting for the artist.

I walked upstairs. Books were jumbled into an old bookcase. I walked toward the two upstairs rooms where Matisse has painted. Both were now bare-bones studios with white walls and tall windows. But still, precisely as in Matisse’s paintings, palm trees loom at the window and Provencal sunlight streams inside.


Looking at the spare white rooms—and yet seeing Matisse’s vibrant ‘rooms’ created with theatrical style—I felt overwhelming admiration for this artist. Matisse imagined and entirely created worlds superbly brought to life in his paintings.

He hung ornate backdrops of Moroccan textiles and laid hand-woven carpets on the floor. He set forged iron tables with goldfish in glass bowls, and dressed his serene and outrageously exotic models in gold- embroidered jackets and gauzy sequined skirts to depict a carefree harem or a super-charged and sensual hot-weather afternoon of delight.

From bare rooms, small rooms, plain interiors, he created a dreamy world and lavish paintings of great opulence. His health was faltering at the time, his years as a painter were fading, and yet these canvases were full of life, full of life force and sensuality.

This was my coup de foudre, a vision of Henri Matisse’s genius, and a true insight into a great artist’s daily life and six years of stunning creativity. These paintings are his legacy and heritage.

Matisse lived and painted at Villa le Reve from 1943 to 1949 when he moved back to Nice. He died in 1954.

"Nature accompanies me, exalts me.”–Pierre Matisse

“I would not get rid of my feelings by copying a tree exactly nor by drawing the leaves one by one in the current idiom. Only after I have identified myself with it, I have created an object that resembles the tree. The symbol of the tree.”–Henri Matisse

Matisse’s Villa le Reve, 261, Avenue Henri Matisse, Vence, Provence, is available for rent for artists, paintings groups and study groups, by the week or for the weekend. for details, contact Joëlle Audry : villalereve@orange.fr, or the Vence Tourist Office, officedetourisme@vence.fr.

The Matisse Museum, 164 Avenue des Arenes de Cimiez, Nice, www.musee-matisse-nice.org.

“The object is not so interesting in itself,” said Matisse. “It is the surroundings that bring the object alive. This is how I have worked my whole life, with the same objects that involve my spirit.”

PHOTO CREDITS:
Color photographs of Villa le Reve by Diane Dorrans Saeks, July 2009.

Black and white portrait of Matisse, and interiors by Helene Adant.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
‘Matisse at Villa le Reve’ by Marie-France Boyer, photography by Helene Adant (Thames & Hudson 2004.)

'Matisse, His Art and His Textiles', (Royal Academy of Arts, London 2004).

For further information: www.franceguide.com, and email officedetourisme@vence.fr

Cultural Icons:
San Francisco Ballet’s Triumph of Beauty
Ballet Bliss: San Francisco Ballet’s current season is dance at its best


Hurtling Onward Into the Constant Now
Recently, I went with my friend Jean to see a matinee performance of extraordinary perfection by the San Francisco Ballet at the gilded San Francisco War Memorial Opera House.

We sat in the front row, orchestra, just millimeters from the first violin, centimeters from the gray-haired conductor, and mere inches, it seemed, from the dancers and their whirling tutus.

I’ve attended programs of the San Francisco Ballet for many years, and always adore the opening gala followed by seasons of innovation and reinvention of classic dance. But this afternoon’s program—an all-Balanchine trio that included ‘Serenade’, ‘Stravinsky Violin Concerto’ and ‘Theme and Variations—was imbued with captivating lyricism.

Every dancer on stage expressed such exquisite control and creativity, utter lissome beauty and heightened degree of emotional intelligence and Jean and I had to dash out into the sunlight for a quick breath of fresh air at each intermission. Perfection is rare in any art form, and we both felt inspired, giddy and thrilled. The gates of perception were thrown open.


The all-Balanchine program consisted of three ballets choreographed in America between 1934 and 1972. Each was simply staged, and each complex and elegant presentation was in a classical, romantic and pared-down modernist style, with simple monochromatic costumes and rigorously refined choreography.

I scribbled a few notes in the dark—‘noble and complex choreography’, ‘the choreographer designs complex patterns and structures across the stage’. And onward I wrote, ‘vortices of delight’, and ‘highly trained dancers, superbly disciplined, are at once tensile and powerful and exquisitely lithe and intuitive’. Clouds of blue tulle hovered in the air. It was at once order and chaos, ever-changing beauty and lasting moments. Exuberant and controlled, bravely leaping into the air, grouping and re-grouping, the dancers turned abstraction and musical inspiration into powerful order and inevitable logic.

It was ballet at its best.



The Importance of Feeding the Eye and Heart
I’ve been attending ballet performances since I was six, when my parents took me to see the Royal Ballet perform ‘Swan Lake’. Breath-taking. This highly trained and superb company at various times included Margot Fonteyn and Rudi Nureyev.

I later studied ballet for some years, along with immersing my growing brain in piano lessons from the great and divine Miss Maisie Kilkelly, and art instruction by the charismatic Robert Brett.

This same inspiration and structure, wild creativity balanced with discipline, still frame my life. “Be orderly in your life so that you can be creative and free in your creation,” said Gustav Flaubert.

Today more than ever, wherever in the world we are, it’s essential to continue to inspire the eye, deconstruct and reconstruct the brain with flashes of perfection and pattern, and creation of the highest level wherever they exist and whenever they appear.

The brain, the eye, the body, the skin, the ears all love and respond to beauty and perfection, strange movements forward, a glance back, and experimental as well as classical artistry and creativity. I attend the season of the San Francisco Opera, and dash to performances in Paris and London and where-ever I travel. Art is as essential as air.

Writers must be alert to all other arts. Designers can be inspired by ballet. Constant exposure to the arts, to classic and avant-garde culture, to opera and art and music of all kinds is essential to designers and artists, architects and antique dealers, creators, writers, composers and style-setters in every field. There’s the performance, but also the interplay of all the disciplines that create an opera or ballet or design or sculpture. So much to learn, to be inspired by.

“The company delivers performances where nothing is more engrossing than the choreography. The sense of selflessness is a crucial characteristic of good Balanchine style,” wrote New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, on Feb 14’s edition. “The San Francisco dancers are a remarkably unmannered, elegant and grown-up company. The adult quality is impressive. Ballet elsewhere so often looks to be a matter for girls and boys.”

Watching and immersing myself in a ballet performance, I’m at once observing and experiencing the emotion of the virtuoso dancers, but also attuned to the ever-changing structure of a dance, the deft geometry of steps and movement across the stage, and the ensemble of costume design, set, lighting, and the mood created. My ear is following the violin or cello or cymbal, my eye is feasting on color and movement and abstract pattern. My brain follows the composition and structure, and my skin tingles with the evanescent beauty.

Doubtless the dry scent of the stage, and frissons of moving air from tutus and ballet slippers and whirling tulle stir memories of dancing class, the Paris Opera ballet, Margot Fonteyn’s lyricism, the Lyon ballet’s clashes, and the wildly erotic male dancers of the innovative Les Ballets de Monte Carlo.
In the profound creative terrain of Balanchine, for example I see the history of ballet re-invented, just as modern architecture re-evaluates classical architecture.


“Vanessa Zahorian has a rivetingly elegant physique, sparklingly precise legs and feet, a beautiful face offset by raven-black hair, and apparently complete technical accomplishment,” said Alastair Macaulay in the New York Times, Feb 14. “She switches effortlessly from sustained adagio to scintillating presto, and the fluent conception of legato behind everything she does helps to give her the pose of a rare artist.” – Critic Alastair Macaulay, New York Times, Feb 14 2010




San Francisco Ballet, the oldest professional ballet company in America, has emerged as a world-class arts organization since it was founded as the San Francisco Opera Ballet in 1933. Initially, its primary purpose was to train dancers to appear in lavish, full-length opera productions. The company now performs it repertoire from January to May each year in San Francisco, and then presents programs around the world, including, recently, in Paris and in Beijing, to great acclaim.

San Francisco Ballet
Highlights of the season:

Program 4: through March 7, includes the poignant and emotional ‘Diving into the Lilacs’ with music by Tchaikovsky, and choreography by the great and expressive Yuri Possokhov.

Also, the rather abstract but captivating and entrancing ‘Into the Middle, Somewhat Elevated’ explores the vocabulary of ballet, with music by Thom Williams and choreography by William Forsythe.
Program 4 San Francisco Ballet premiere offers the exciting and sometimes jarring and tragic ‘Petrouchka’, music by Stravinsky, and choreography by Michel Fokine. This Ballets Russes classic dance fuses the history of ballet with the classical Russian puppet tale. This will be memorable.

Program 5: through March 28. ‘The Little Mermaid’ is a dramatic reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1836 story. Music by Auerbach. United States premiere. This is not the cartoon-related concept, but rather more like ‘Swan Lake’ with fins instead of wings. Torment and haunting! Danish feminists detest this story. Let’s see if this Hamburg Ballet choreography can make the mermaid heroic and purposeful rather than merely mad and tragic.)

Program 6: through April 21, is a superb trio that includes the ‘Haffner’ Symphony, with dance by Helgi Tomasson, music by Mozart. It’s an abstract portrait of Mozartian refinement, through choreography. This program also offers the world premiere of Italian choreographer Renato Zanella’s new ballet. I can’t wait to see it.

Finally in this program, ‘Russian Seasons’, the profoundly classical choreography by Alexei Tatmansky, with composition by Desyatnikov. Lovely, reflective.

Program 7: through April 20, includes ‘Rush’ by Christopher Wheeldon to music by Martinu. This program features the world premiere of a new dance by San Francisco Ballet choreographer in residence, the great Yuri Possokhov (one of my favorite dancers).

I don’t always find humor in ballet very convincing (it’s often forced and feels astonishingly awkward and kitschy on stage)…there is ‘The Concert (Or, The Perils of Everybody’). I detest the name. Choreographer is Robbins, music by Chopin. I might love it. I might leave early.

Program 8: through May 9, is the full-length ‘Romeo & Juliet’, choreographed by Tomasson to Prokofiev’s music. I saw a preview at the opening night gala, and it was tender, classic, artful and exquisite. I adore the emotive and engaging music, and the stage sets for this presentation are poetic and redolent of romance and time. Doubtless I will also be thinking of Margot and Rudi, the most exquisite and profoundly touching duo in these roles. Blessings to them both, wherever they are (dancing in heaven?).


ARTISTS OF THE COMPANY: 2010 REPERTORY SEASON

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR & PRINCIPAL CHOREOGRAPHER
Helgi Tomasson

PRINCIPAL DANCERS
Joan Boada, Frances Chung, Taras Domitro, Lorena Feijoo, Jaime Garcia Castilla, Tiit Helimets, Davit Karapetyan, Maria Kochetkova, Kristin Long, Vitor Luiz Rubén Martín Cintas, Pascal Molat, Gennadi Nedvigin, Damian Smith, Sofiane Sylve, Yuan Yuan Tan, Sarah Van Patten, Pierre-François Vilanoba, Katita Waldo, and Vanessa Zahorian.


All performances take place at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. For more information and to book tickets, www.sfballet.org.


Photography above includes images of:
San Francisco Ballet in Balanchine's Serenade (blue gowns); Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith in Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto (black leotard); Yuan Yuan Tan and Anthony Spaulding in Possokhov's Diving Into The Lilacs (black leotard, pink skirt); Sofiane Sylve in Ratmansky's Russian Seasons (red emsemble, in air); Katita Waldo and Damian Smith in Wheeldon's Rush (red hair, black tights): Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-François Vilanoba in Tomasson's Romeo & Juliet.

Photo credits:
All photography here courtesy the San Francisco Ballet. Photography by Chris Hardy and Erik Tomasson.

Cards I Love:
Parthenia Handcrafted Notecards

Patricia Gaye Tapp, creative dreamer of the design and style blog Little Augury, is a most fascinating Southern interior designer with a passion for handcrafted cards. Escape to North Carolina with me for a visit and meet a very fabulous and mysterious blogger



Patricia Gaye Tapp is a Southern interior designer who dreams up and crafts and creates the most enchanting stationery.

P. Gaye Tapp is also the dreamy, poetic, and somewhat elusive founder and writer of the highly original design and style blog, Little Augury.

Her blog—which covers everything from pre-Raphaelite decorating, long-lost art, early photography and Oscar Wilde, to African fashion designers, Gloria Swanson, French style, obscure poetry and rare books—first caught my eye when I began researching the world of blogs in advance of founding my design blog. She’s a big favorite of many of my favorite bloggers, including Emily Evans Eerdmans, Joni Webb, and Jennifer Boles.

Reading Little Augury, I discovered that her style blog could be poetic, elusive, a bit eccentric, on a trajectory from factual, wildly romantic, and with highly-detailed text that seemed written long after midnight.

Little Augury writes with candor and wit and a whiff of stream-of-consciousness. And who was this mysterious ‘Little Augury’ who had such a vivid and insightful eye? There was once a portrait of her on the blog. It’s blurry and seems to be of a cheerfully blonde young woman circa 1978.

When I launched my blog, THE STYLE SALONISTE, last summer, Little Augury was one of the first of the top bloggers to find me and send me very encouraging messages. I eventually sleuthed out that she was a designer, lived somewhere in the South, and that her blog posts captured an out-of-time sensibility.

Then a package arrived, filled with her Parthenia cards. In the box were cards ruffled with velvet trim, fluttering with blue feathers, framed with gilt-edged ribbons, scented with a thousand Southern summers, and mottled with the air of decades and oceans crossed.

Parthenia cards by Little Augury, Patricia Gaye Tapp. Each is unique.

Patricia sent me some missives.

“The notecards are a little project of mine, and I got into them when I stumbled on a very old set of fine fashion illustration at a junk shop,” said Little Augury, aka Patricia Gaye Tapp. “All of a sudden I had a collection of more than one hundred, and I kept them on their shelf in a bookcase. I kept finding antique postcards and old etchings, and adding to the collection.”

P. Gaye Tapp has her own design firm, P. Gaye Tapp Interior Design, so she was too busy to notice that eventually she had a superb collection of drawings, French postcards, Italian art postcards, and reproductions of fine old paintings.






“I decided to take the originals and do them up in detailed and framed statement cards,” she recalled. “I must say it was exacting work but I enjoyed it. Some of my favorites include such beauties as etchings of Marie Antoinette, more of Napoleon, Boucher paintings, birds, dogs, and some wonderful Italian paintings of madonnas.”

P. Gaye Tapp called her company Parthenia.

“Parthenia was my great-great-great-great-grandmother’s lovely name,” she said.

Each card is unique.

“I suppose I would sell more if I made multiples, but I don't think I would enjoy the copying, as something is missing,” said the designer. “The canine cards feature fine reproductions of old photographs of dogs and their masters. Those I could not part with. Some of the cards feature the same image-but they are all laid out and embellished with ribbons and adorned very differently.”






Interior design has been Little Augury’s life work for over twenty-five years.

“I am very much inspired by a creative and talented GranMa and my mother,” she said. “I grew up in a small Southern town in North Carolina, like my grandmother and my mother. It is the place I have returned to after being away for those twenty-five years. Back to my roots as it were. My family is very tightly knit, and the old Southern style, family first, still resonates for me.”





P. Gaye Tapp, rummaging through flea markets and estate sales and her own secret sources has collected and gathered and amassed more than five hundred vintage and antique post cards, all dating far beyond the 1930's.

“Most of the post cards on the Parthenia cards are the original. There is one and only one card,” she said.. “The delight is in the bit of time it takes to marry all the elements of the cards. I never know where they might take me.”

Little Augury also makes custom cards.

“I designed a wonderful card with an old photograph of my grandfather and his friends, on which he had inscribed " on the road to the asylum," she said. “I created a story inside the card with bits of related things dear to him, including photographs of my grandmother during their courtship just before 1920.”





“My photograph collection continues to grow and I would love some day to offer these as limited edition works. I have terrific photographs of animals of all sorts dating from the 1940's and some beautiful photographs of horse and rider. We will see what comes of it all, meanwhile.”



DDS: Next plan?

PGT: I will see where the wind takes me. I continue on with my design work, traveling back in to Raleigh, an hour's drive, once or twice a week, for long-time clients. I have the makings of some interesting original vintage photographs in a collection that I can have custom framed,” she said. “I have such beautiful collections and rare images. Somewhere there is always another project for another day.”


Prices range from $6 to $27.

website: www.parthenia-papier.com/
etsy: www.etsy.com/shop/partheniapapier

For purchasing inquiries and all other information please contact: ptapp@charter.net

or write to:
Parthenia
209 Morgan Street
Roxboro, NC 27573

Design I Love:
Classic and Pure: Belgian Linen, Centuries Old, is Chic and New Again
Natural Linen Is the Essential Ingredient of Trend-setting Belgian Interior Style




I’ve always loved Belgian linen. I like the cool, dry touch of a linen shirt, the soothing coolness of linen sheets, and the crunch and texture of sheer washed linen curtains blowing in the summer air.

I especially love pure white linen and I have a collection of white linen shirts and blouses to wear in the South of France and India and other hot-weather places.

I’m not a wash-and-wear kind. Linen looks so impeccable when it’s just pressed, and so endearingly floppy and soft and friendly when it’s washed and worn a few times.

In Paris in the summer, some of my favorite sights are the bookish 'intello' types who hang out at Café de Flore and Les Deux-Magots, garbed in a well-worn linen shirt, rumpled and crumpled, its contours over time taking on a certain languor and ease.




Belgian Linen in weights from airy tissue to substantial burlap, and in toned-down colors from pewter and fig to plum, celadon and caramel signifies a new design direction for international style.

Pure Belgian linen is the focus and art of Libeco linens, created and woven and dyed by a 150-year old company in Belgium. It is the choice of all those chic/simple designs everyone copies from Beta-Plus books.











Libeco uses traditional techniques and classic styles that give its home decor, textiles, decorative accessories, table decor, bed linens and clothing certain integrity and authority.

The plain, unpatterned linen also signifies a return to simpler textures and fabrics. Alongside unadorned linen, some multi-colored prints suddenly look frantic.



The sober and unpretentious look of Belgian linen also offers a key to the rigor and sobriety of chic Belgian décor of the last few years. It is also a design secret of Axel Vervoordt’s influential understated interiors. Belgian linen is also among the reasons for Belgium’s dramatic rise in the style stakes.

I’ve always admired the timeless style of Axel Vervoordt and the many ways he uses Belgian linens in ivory or pewter or natural undyed styles in his ultra-refined and elegant interiors.

One of my favorite rooms in Axel’s castle just outside Antwerp is the second floor sitting room. It has a scrubbed oak floor, and is furnished with an armchair in mocha linen and an overscale sofa with a pale ivory linen cover.

This room is super-subtle and monochromatic with ivory plaster walls. Splashes of black from a gold-framed massive Tapies painting, a fireplace with a granite surround and a Japanese calligraphy, are juxtaposed in spring with over-arching flowering branches of wild rhododendron from his garden. The effect in the sumptuous castle setting is very understated, giving the room a somewhat Japanese austerity.

The sofa in this room is slipcovered in washed ivory Belgian linen, simply tailored over the wide flat seat and narrow arms. This lovely linen, simple and pure, drapes softly and neatly down to the plank floor. It is a breath-takingly plain performance, in a castle where antiques of noble provenance and museum-worthy works of art would usually command embroideries, brocades, silks and other heavy-duty traditional textiles. Belgian designers love their linen—and use it with power and confidence.






In contrast with the silks and brocades and lavish textiles beloved in French décor over the centuries, linen has always been a favorite element in Belgian décor.

I was reminded again of the effectiveness, grace and character of Belgian linen some years ago when I was visiting Brussels to conduct private antiques research. Invited to visit the newly decorated apartment of Jean-Marc Louis, an Algerian-born Belgian artist whose works I had recently acquired. I walked with him through a maze of cobblestone streets and lanes fragrant with mediaeval bricks and centuries-old stones, amid shadow and light and springtime lime blossoms.

Finally, we turned to enter an oak doorway. We traversed a dark corridor, and marched up several flights of steep sixteenth-century wooden stairs worn to smooth satin by countless leather soled and hundreds of applications of floor wax.

Up and up we went, until we arrived at a black-painted door opening into Jean-Louis’ apartment.

Plaster walls were white, floors were scrubbed old oak planks, and tall narrow windows were open to welcome views of slate rooftops and a jumble of chimneys. Was I in the twentieth century or the seventeenth?

I turned to take in the pared-down and superbly edited living room.

Then I saw it—the Belgian linen signature—a large Vervoordt-esque sprawling sofa upholstered simply in heavy linen in the strangest and most compelling color, used so boldly in this graphic traditional/modern interior. It was a color with no name. The hue was a dulled down purple/violet/plum color with a good dose of grey. I would say the color was dour. But elegant.

Sunlight splashed through the lead windowpanes of the apartment and illuminated the grey/plum sofa. The sober color seemed at once ancient—as if it had been dyed from some long-ago extinct plant or flower and washed in the river. At the same time, the sobriety of the color and its oddness made it look entirely new.






Belgian linen has clearly left its impression on me. While the bed linens I usually slumber on are pure white Frette Egyptian cotton, I also keep sets of hemstitched white Belgian linen sheets for summer. Freshly pressed, they remind me of summers in the Swedish archipelago, of the gilded suites at Il Palazzo at the Bauer in Venice in the summer (the linens gloriously cool on a hot summer day) and long ago romantic hot-weather idylls in hidden apartments in Rome and Capri.







Onward to the present. I’ve just rediscovered that classic Libeco pure Belgian linen is now available in the US. (See below for information). There is the Libeco Home collection, which includes versatile table linens and traditional bed linens, as well as 100 per cent linen apparel and accessories, fringed scarves, and superb white linen shirts for men and women. The styles are simple and unadorned—all the better to show off the essential character and purity of the linens. There is even pure linen sleepwear, which is always a luxury, and always hard to find at any price.

The company was founded around 150 years ago, and the quality and weaving are superb. This is the real Belgian style—in all the austere and low-key colors that are the signature of Belgian interiors. The best aspect: the Belgian designers for this company have stayed true to Belgian aesthetics and ideals. It’s pure style—not meddled with or changed at all for an international market.






Among my favorite new Libeco products are a collection of table clothes and pillows in soft colors like flax, pewter, moss, taupe, fog, dark grey, mauve and natural. This is the archetypal Belgian color palette—subtle, soft, sober, slightly dusty and powdery, and a wonderful tranquil antidote to screaming colors and primary tones.

In the new January 2010 collections I love the chunky knit linen throws and blankets in natural hues (so chic), as well as striped fringed throws, and pillows and sheets in floral prints.

Noteworthy are eco-linen towels, heavy twill tablecloths (true heirlooms), as well as pinstriped linen sheets and duvet covers.

To entice designers to follow in the Belgian mode (and perhaps in the footsteps of Axel Vervoordt), Libeco also offers pure linen by the yard, for upholstery and curtains (from select retailers, check on www.libeco.com).

Some designs, such as Sienna striped tablecloths are in natural linen with a rather rustic feeling. Other tablecloth designs, like Libeco's Venise, Vence and Champlitte, are classic white, timeless and very elegant. Pure white linens (also in linen-cotton blends) will never go out of style. They are true heirlooms. Vence is also available in colors like celadon, henna, plum frost (that gray/plum I love), picholine (olive), taupe, sage, oyster, and mauve.

Among the apparel collections, I appreciate the white shirts, as well as a series of ethereal fringed shawls in plain colors like oyster and pale blue.

For a trousseau, Libeco’s Basics are an enchanting series of bed linens, in white, light blue and rose, as well as white edged with blue or rose.

Belgian linen. I can’t have enough.

Sweet dreams!






Libeco January 2010 collections, select items and retail prices:

Basics pattern – White 100% Linen Queen Flat Sheet: $295.

Vence pattern – Café Noir, Light Grey, Oyster, Spice or Taupe 100% Linen Queen Flat Sheet: $275.

Libeco Home linen by the yard – Available through Libeco Home Retailers. (Check on www.libeco.com to find retailers.) 100% Linen by the yard from $95.00 yard (at 72” width).

Bastia – Apricot or Fig Striped Linen tablecloth, from $150 (for 69” x 71”).

Frascati – 100% Linen reversible tablecloth, from $199 (for 69” x 69”).

Rapallo – 100% linen cable knit throw: $460.00.

Chester – 100% Linen Grommet Drapery: $340.00 ea. (55” x 106”).




For ordering and information on where to buy Libeco linens, please contact:

www.libeco.com – click on ‘Consumer’ for a list of points of sale per country.
www.LibecoHomeStores.com to buy products worldwide online.
Libeco Home New York sales office: 212.764.6644.




Photography credits: Belgian linen products photographs courtesy Libeco, used with permission.

Photograph of Oriental room designed by Axel Vervoordt, from 'Axel Vervoordt Timeless Interiors’ published by Rizzoli. Used with permission.