Giambattista Valli, the king of coruscating couture, makes his entrance in his apartment in the heart of Paris's Ile Saint-Louis, looking every inch the grand seigneur. A rope of Basra pearls that once belonged to a maharaja is tucked insouciantly into the neckline of his black sweatshirt. He found the apartment through a happy chance (more of that anon). It is 18th-century, the ceilings soar skywards, and the rooms look out through grand country plantings on the balconies to a handsome private courtyard down below. ‘I love this idea of having a country house on the island that is, not being in Paris!’ he exults, and it does indeed have the feeling of a rustic manor house. (One elderly neighbour, leaving the building to go shopping over the bridge, says: ‘Today I’m going to Paris I shall come back later’, and that captures precisely how Giambattista himself feels.)
The apartment is bathed in a curious green glow; it took ‘a million tries’, claims the designer, to capture ‘the right tone of green. Something that will caress your mind. And when you arrive in the private area, the green becomes more acid, because I wanted to have the bedroom beyond in a pink colour. Because I thought it was nice having two daddies living in pink!’ Giambattista’s partner, Farid Rebbali, shares his passion for exotica, and their son Adam, 11, has acquired it through trips to the subcontinent since he was three. ‘It belongs to a specific pink in India,’ he continues. ‘It's a pink you can smell, a pink that belongs to the roses from the markets outside the temples.’ Paris, he avers, ‘is very grey’. He is at heart a Roman, so this capital’s endless winter
is torture to him.
His last flat was a ‘parquet, mouldings, cheminée’, late 19th-century marvel high up in a building round the corner from the Quai de Valmy. When he first moved to the 11th arrondissement (some 15 years ago), the area was a little raw around the edges. His apartment was not. Here he had soirées with the flawless socialite Lee Radziwill, who appreciated its bohemian energy – and with her breathy, little-girl intonation delivered some real zingers – and younger beauties like the
reed-slim Bianca Brandolini, a tomboy despite her exquisite dress sense and legs for days.
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Now he has moved on. One evening about two years ago, the designer had been chatting to Ophelie Guillermand, a beloved former model, extolling the joys of the Ile Saint-Louis with its village-like atmosphere and lost-in-time air; in fact, he rather longed to relocate there. Ophelie didn’t say anything but called him several weeks later and told him she had been working at Sotheby’s; she sent him two flats that hadn’t yet been listed, and that she felt might interest him. One was on the Ile de la Cité, which Giambattista dismissed (judging it too crowded and touristy); the other was on the Ile Saint-Louis. This one he was keen to see, and made an appointment the next day. Sequestered at the back of the building, the apartment was shabby and unloved, but he could see then and there how it could come back to magical life. ‘When I walked in,’ he recalls, ‘I knew it was the place.’
His apartment still echoes with water; before it was the Canal Saint-Martin, now it’s the lapping of the Seine. For he has landed in a building that was originally built to face the easternmost tip of the island, like the Hôtel Lambert, the majestic 1640s town house designed by Louis Le Vau. A wing was added to Giambattista’s house in the 19th century, orientating it to the southern aspect of the Seine. His own apartment faces a private courtyard and boasts an embarrassment of Neoclassical details. He loves the fact that two grand rooms lead to a dressing room and a bedroom and bathroom, a layout that reminds him of a hotel suite.
The curtains are printed with copies of his Indian studies, collected on one of his frequent trips to that magical country. He was helped by some wonderful craftspeople along the way; in the welcoming dining room, one of them, Pierre Chapelain, a master stucco worker, created the spiral staircase that leads to a floor that did not exist before. Through both grand rooms runs this second-floor walkway and balcony that leads on one side to Giambattista’s atelier, with its desk by Christian Liaigre (gifted by Lee when she returned to New York) and a plethora of Yves Saint Laurent costume studies, and on the other to his son Adam’s bedroom. Giambattista was dubious about getting permission for this extension in a highly protected building (terrified that he’d be left to live with the stairs in an ugly formation), but ultimately the authorities looked kindly on him. ‘So I have my floating island, where I sketch. And Adam, he and his friends have their own world.’
Downstairs in the dining room, Giambattista added a Jansen fireplace – all 1970s chrome – and hung Warhol’s study of the outrageous Venezuelan Victor Hugo (Halston’s boyfriend) above it. Part of the owner’s impressive collection of drawings, pen-and-ink studies and photographs (by Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, George Condo, Dalí, Chagall, Picabia among others) are arranged on shelves or stacked on the floor here. Against the kitchen wall, waiting to be hung, are clustered Nan Goldin’s unforgettable photographs of her life and loves in the smack-addled 1980s. The drawing room, meanwhile, is imposing. For the designer, it is ‘very Italian: Pierre Paulin and De Sede in conversation,’ he says of the 1960s and 70s sofas set here.
It didn’t all go smoothly, though. ‘I remember in the middle of this huge construction site, there was this point, where you could not go back because everything was destroyed, and there seemed no vision of the future..... and I was like “Oh my God!’’ He soldiered on, and bit by bit the apartment took shape. Now, as Giambattista claims, it is ‘my happy place’.
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