Who is the interior designer Jacques Garcia?
“The Château de Breteuil is a living residence, which has preserved its furniture and paintings over several centuries! I didn’t have to hunt for a lot of objects, I mainly gathered these pieces of furniture and reconstituted coherent decors in the appropriate rooms. » This is how Jacques Garcia, an interior designer sought after by the jet-set around the world, comments on his work to refurnish four 18th and 19th century salons in this private château in Yvelines.
He did it voluntarily, in the name of a long friendship with the owners, the Breteuil family. “Jacques is a magician! », enthuses Pauline, the hostess, who says she still ordered 70 m of pink fabric, intended to be placed, pleated, on the walls of a cabinet dedicated to the memory of Marie-Antoinette, or even 400 m of Beijing braid (a sort of taffeta), to border the curtains of the Louis XV salon…
Beauty must be shared
At 78 years old, the famous decorator is not his first patronage: he was the director of the thirty-five decorative arts rooms of the 17th and 18th centuries at the Louvre. At Versailles too, he brought his “eye” as he says, to reconstruct the private apartments of the kings of France. “The beauty of the objects resulting from the genius of the artisans and the harmony of the decorations must be shared by all,” believes this man of modest origins.
He discovered art in part “thanks to the Malraux law”, which, from 1962, encouraged castle owners to open their doors to the public in exchange for tax exemption for their work. “My parents also took me to museums and, at 14, to Saint Peter’s in Rome (Italy). There, I cried,” he says, however refuting the idea of “aesthetic shock”: “It was rather a deep and gentle impregnation. I knew at that moment both that I was truly a Christian and that art would give meaning to my life. » So, in 1966, he became a scholarship holder at the famous Penninghen graphic arts school in Paris, while hunting, with his father, for his first Ancien Régime objects.
Extreme attention to detail
If he begins with contemporary decors, the “Garcia style” becomes eclectic, while the man acquires a great knowledge of the history of art objects. A fan of warm colors and the shimmer of fabrics, he creates lively atmospheres thanks to extreme attention to detail.
Since the 1990s, the decorator admits to earning a lot of money thanks to the forty projects carried out by his Parisian agency: “I can thus give my time to public heritage and restore Champ-de-Bataille, which costs me a lot of money,” he explains.
The immense Château du Champ-de-Bataille, next to Neubourg, in Eure, is his masterpiece: Jacques Garcia acquired it in 1992, abandoned. He found a suitable setting to present his collection. Having discovered plans by Lenôtre, landscaper to Louis
Before returning to his Norman palace, Jacques Garcia had his reconstruction of a Second Empire style salon admired in Breteuil. Next to a Chinese lacquer chest of drawers, he presents an “indiscret”, a sort of assembly of three armchairs in the shape of a clover, which he found in another part of the castle. “Give me a bunch of furniture and I know exactly what to do with it,” he laughs. Feet on a leopard patterned carpet which he assures us was very fashionable in the 19th century, we can only admire.
