Even before he announced his retirement from fashion earlier this year, clients of Dries van Noten treasured his clothes like precious heirlooms. One of the most successful independent designers in the world, the Belgian has, since 1986, straddled the romantic and the avant-garde with collections, uniting the two with his singular eye for colour, texture, craft and how to cultivate that magical interplay between them, inspiring legions of devotees.
Van Noten has a knack, too, for translating his very particular aesthetic into sets, stores and domestic spaces. He is the master of capturing a mood, as he has long demonstrated season after season through the house’s emotional catwalk shows, the staging of which ranges from the strikingly simple to the richly extravagant. For his spring 2015 womenswear show, Van Noten recreated the feeling of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia with a mossy forest floor crafted by textile artist Alexandra Kehayoglou. For spring/summer 2017, meanwhile, he commissioned the Japanese floral artist Azuma Makoto to make exquisite botanical arrangements frozen in towers of ice that crackled as they melted under the lights. His final show, earlier this year, will be remembered for its golden glitter storm.
His more permanent interiors are designed to be lingered in. Each of his boutiques is an individual experience, a guide book-worthy destination, the first of which opened in Antwerp in 1989 in a former gentlemen’s clothing shop.
Nearly 20 years ago, The World of Interiors visited the then new Parisian womenswear boutique, a former bookstore in a 17th-century town house at Quai Malaquais on the Left Bank (WoI June 2007). It was typically idiosyncratic of Van Noten to decide upon the antiques quarter rather than the Rue St-Honoré. The rumour-steeped Marguerite ‘La Reine Margot’ de Valois, the queen Henry IV of France would divorce, built her palace here; the novelist George Sand lived in an apartment in the building. The shop’s interior design referenced Rococo and Neoclassical styles, with a tented conservatory and yellow drapes, subverted by witty furnishing touches chosen by Van Noten and Vangheluwe – from a 1970s portable TV to Charles de Beistegui’s red-lacquered bridge table, to the shock of a 30s lunar lightbulb chandelier. ‘We like auctions and flea markets, and pieces that you have to learn to love, that transform when they’re placed in an unusual context,’ Van Noten said at the time.
The feature’s writer, James Sherwood, described the designer as ‘a collector with no provenance snobbery and more than a little playfulness’. It’s this catholic approach to beauty, this layering of remarkable pieces from different periods – with the odd unexpected sensory jolt – that keeps the eye delighted. (A men’s store and beauty store have since opened close by.)
Van Noten’s pièce de résistance, however, is Ringenhof, the Palladian-style 1840s house outside Antwerp where he and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, have lived for almost three decades (WoI Dec 2012). Over the years, the designer has transformed the place, and its grounds, into something of a fairytale hideaway, enclosed by enchanting gardens.
While trying wherever possible to keep original features of the building, the couple ‘wanted to create a lived-in feeling, layered by several generations, mixing different periods, precious and flea-market finds’, as Van Noten put it when he opened their home up to WoI. Even before these additions, the house itself stood as a bit of a palimpsest. Damaged during World War I, it was redecorated in a motley range of styles in 1920, with reproduction period rooms beautifully executed by the Belgian decorator-architects Franck. The entrance hall, for instance, paid homage to Louis XV Rococo, while a high Empire-style living room boasted silk wall coverings thought to have been woven in Lyon. In the ground-floor kitchen, originally a lady’s sitting room decorated in a Neo-Gothic flavour, they kept the distinctive original wall covering and added a pair of cabinets in the same style, found in a Belgian brocante store, to serve as pantry cupboards for dried goods and cookbooks – the modern domestic clashing arrestingly with the antique.
Throughout the house, the same philosophy of layering diverse pieces and periods provokes interesting design conversations. Treasures WoI collected in its pages included a vibrant Zuber ‘Vue Du Brésil’ screen, paired with a colonial table inlaid with exotic woods from Christopher Hodsoll; another room sets Belgian pottery from the 1940s alongside mid-century Italian chairs lined in velvet. The couple’s art collection included a portrait of the Duke of Cumberland attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Antique finds from English towns such as Petworth elegantly riffed with witty gifts from friends – including a necklace the late Iris Apfel designed for a shopping TV channel.
Textiles, of course, both antique and bespoke, will always contribute to the romance of any space Van Noten has a hand in. When Vogue visited Ringenhof in 2014, it found the designer ‘justifiably proud of the magnificent antique yellow damask curtains in the master bedroom, newly acquired from a Swiss château’. Van Noten is the third generation in a family of tailors, and his mother was a a collector of antique linens and lace. From the earliest age, as a result, her son fostered appreciation of and passion for beautifully made materials. It was a gift that he would go on to share – to the wider world’s delight.
For more about Dries van Noten, visit driesvannoten.com
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