Valentino Garavani, who passed away at the age of 93, was Italian through and through, from his debonair manner to his suavely tailored suits. But when he was asked about the biggest influences on his work and life and he steered the conversation halfway across the globe. China, he said, enthralled him, especially its reverence for history and the beauty of its traditional craftsmanship. “When I was in Beijing for the first time, in 1993,” Valentino remembered, “I saw a collection of old Chinese costumes, and it was one of the great emotional moments of my life.”
Evidence of the fashion designer’s Sinophilia can be found throughout Château de Wideville, his magisterial 17th-century house outside Paris, built by Louis XIII’s finance minister and later home to one of Louis XIV’s mistresses. Valentino, who also maintained luxurious footholds in London, Rome, New York City, and Gstaad, Switzerland, acquired the eight-bedroom château in 1995 and commissioned eminent interior decorator Henri Samuel to make it comfortable yet regal. “We did every room together,” Valentino said of their work, which was completed the following year, two months before the nonagenarian Samuel died. “I am quite particular and love to put my nose everywhere. Even if I admire the decorator, I have to say my opinion.”
Since Valentino retired from his eponymous firm in 2008—the company, launched in 1959, was purchased in July by the royal family of Qatar—he spended several months each year at Wideville and entertained there with panache. In addition to intimate weekend visits from boldface friends, the designer hosted 2011’s Love Ball, an annual benefit for Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova’s Naked Heart Foundation, which raises money to build accessible playgrounds for children who are impoverished or have disabilities. Valentino’s favorite spot on the estate, was the château’s winter garden, a multipurpose chamber furnished largely au chinois. Masses of Asian ceramics came into decorative play: famille-rose garden seats, stout covered jars perched on gilt-wood consoles, and a battalion of figures garbed in Chinese costumes and displayed on golden wall brackets.
Another cherished retreat was the pigeonnier he saved from dilapidation. “It was the last thing I restored,” Valentino said of the cylindrical three-story structure trimmed with limestone and red brick. Originally erected to raise doves—for food as well as for their droppings (used as fertilizer)—the tower served as a quiet, fanciful hideaway where he could escape to read, listen to music, and reflect on his latest design projects.
The pigeonnier, Valentino said, was a challenge to decorate. “You couldn’t put in the usual 18th-century European furniture and objects, like in the château—it wouldn’t feel right,” explains the couturier, who also transformed the estate’s two-story hay barn into a sleekly minimalist archive for his nearly five decades in fashion. “I said, ‘No, I want to do something special.’” Perhaps even more special and more dramatic than his beloved winter garden.
Taking the chinoiserie theme in a slightly more modern direction, Valentino installed a decor redolent of 1920s Shanghai, employing sharp lines and graphic contrasts. Down came the pigeonnier’s rickety wood steps and up went a curving staircase with a handmade fretwork railing of vibrantly painted metal that wouldn’t look out of place in a staging of Turandot. Colorful Qing-dynasty ancestor portraits scale the walls, while the staircase’s narrow landings and galleries display folding screens and statues of cranes. Windows and bookcases are crowned by gilded pediments that mimic thatched roofs, iron lanterns hang throughout, and even the cinnabar-red bindings of the Christie’s auction catalogues filling the bookshelves fit in with the Far Eastern atmosphere. There are 19th-century lacquer chests and hand-carved tables gleaming with inlaid mother-of-pearl—plus velvet-clad tufted armchairs ready for admiring it all. Almost everything is Chinese in the comfortable sitting area that takes up the pigeonnier’s lowest level.
When Valentino began collecting Asian objects—his first important acquisition, in 1964, was a Ming horse. He was not a big connoisseur. But he learned. Longtime friend Carlos Souza, the Valentino brand ambassador, used to say that to fall asleep at night, instead of counting sheep, he counted porcelain.
