No pompous villa full of opulent playfulness, rather a manor house of cool elegance, which tells more about bourgeois representation than of royal splendor: the ‘Villa Louveciennes# by Karl Lagerfeld. For many years, the fashion tsar, who died in 2019, renovated and designed the property around 20 kilometers west of Paris – only to do it in the end. A place that is as puzzling as his creator.
On July 1st, the property should come under the hammer. The estimated value is, according to the notaries entrusted with the sale, Maîtres Jérôme Cauro and Arno Felber, at 4.635 million euros. To do this, in Louveciennes, where the nobler of the Versailles Hofs once had their country seats built, around 600 square meters of living space – a former hunting castle with stately entrance, elegant salons, a study, several bedrooms, four bathrooms and an elevator.
The park is extensive, with pool, pool house and tennis court. This includes several outbuildings – as well as a hint of biography that remains noticeable in every room. Only the furniture is missing: they have long been auctioned.
A night in the pool house
In 2014, Lagerfeld acquired the property – and in the following four years they had it redesigned with the obsession with detail that is inseparable from its name. As so often, myth and reality mix with him. It is said that he bought it only to live out one of his great passions: the interior.
A total work of art was created for space – completed to the chrome -plated fire extinguisher, composed like a collection. And yet: in the end he is said to have only spent one night there.
According to the notaries, the Maestro is not said to have slept in the main building, but in the glass pool house – an elegant cube with integrated kitchen, bedroom and sauna. Adjacent to the pool house: a silent, specially fenced piece of lawn-once a play area from Choupette, Lagerfeld’s small Burma cat.
Almost monastic clarity
In the house, symmetry and sophisticated simplicity determine the atmosphere. Nothing distracts, everything is well thought out – in the sense of Lagerfeld that never trusted the superfluous.
Nothing bothers the eye. Even the house technology with its tubes, lines and connections was discreetly moved to the outbuildings. But the rigor does not remain cold: Several light -flooded salons open to the park and create a balance between controlled architecture and playful lightness – such as Lagerfeld itself, the discipline and esprit always knew how to connect pragmatically.
Childhood in leopard wallpaper
Karl Lagerfeld, who did not cook and did not get any cooking smells, is said to have redesigned the kitchen three times before the desired result was achieved. Striking: the kitchen has five sinks. Why? That remains another mystery.
A particularly touching-and curious-place is a room that was reproduced to the room of his childhood on the family of the family in Bissenmoor near Hamburg: with Leopard wallpaper and an original Louis XVI bed. There was a painting on the wall that sparked his lifelong fascination for the age of the Enlightenment and the Baroque: Frederick the Great welcomes Voltaire in Sanssouci.
A self -portrait? Perhaps. Lagerfeld later also wore a white -powdered braid. “Prince or nothing”, as he formulated himself.
Readers of a past everyday life
Another world begins on the first floor: studio, office, adjoining rooms. The walls still carry traces of his rage of reading – dowels everywhere, remains of shelves. Lagerfeld is said to have owned between 250,000 and 300,000 books. The library, which he had set up in one of the outbuildings, counted over 20,000 of them.
Ten books at the same time, three languages in parallel – English, French, German – that was quite normal for him, he once said. Philosophers, poets, historians: Lagerfeld was able to call up like other telephone numbers.
Returned, composed through, in detail: in every room of the house there is something of him – strict, silence, style. Feelings, relationships, past – he kept all of this at a distance. “My bedroom is private with me,” he said once. And so Louveciennes remains another fragment of that puzzles called Karl Lagerfeld.