Like European monarchs of old, Jacques Garcia has a regal vision of the life he wishes to lead. A country seat of some magnificence was key, so around 40 years ago the Paris-based interior decorator, who is actually quite modest but visited lots of historic castles and manors as a child, acquired Château du Champ de Bataille, a red-brick pleasuredome in a vast park in Normandy. Both the sprawling building and the rolling acreage were melancholy and worn, but they had great promise, suggested by the name of the commune in which the estate is situated: Sainte-Opportune-du-Bosc. Thus, Garcia has approached Champ de Bataille – built on a battlefield in the 1650s and 1660s by a political exile who apparently used his downtime wisely – as a canvas, and an immense one at that. Every few years, as time and money allow, he adds another scene to the domestic composition, another touch of extravagance: here a temple dedicated to Leda (WoI Feb 2011), a queen, whom Zeus, disguised as a swan, seduced; there a Rajasthani-style mini palace for entertaining that Garcia calls the Pavillon des Rêves and that incorporates Mughal architectural elements from centuries past.
Of late, a grotto has materialised, an artful destination that he describes as ‘one more element which adds to the philosophy, the sensitivity, the poetry, and the sense of travel’. Begun in 2010 and completed last year, it is the latest extravagance to ornament Champ de Bataille, and the most dramatic: a brooding mountain of basalt-encrusted concrete that is almost entirely camouflaged with vegetation and perched atop a rusticated arcade. Golden gates open to a descending staircase, and one passes into a fever dream of sparkle and shine, like stepping into a geode.
Beneath a golden vaulted ceiling pierced by an oculus, silvery mirrors reflect rugged walls of channelled basalt and columns that are clad in annealed charcoal to mimic obsidian and crowned by golden masks. Ghostly statues of mythological beings are tucked into niches, striking alluring attitudes as they gaze on to a central space that serves as a theatre in the round. Stalagmites of schist rise from the limestone, marble and red-brick floor and creep up the columns, framing a circular channel of rushing water. Even more stalagmites emerge from an exterior pond that Garcia excavated along one side of the grotto.
Delectably conceived and grandly scaled – the heart of the grotto is 15 metres high, from floor to ceiling – it is quite mad, he admits, but so is its inspiration. The Venus Grotto at Schloss Linderhof in Germany is one of Ludwig II of Bavaria’s most superbly delirious creations, an 1870s fantasia equipped with a miniature lake on which the addled monarch set sail in a gilded barge in the shape of a seashell, the whole installation replicating a scene from Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner, Ludwig’s emotional and musical obsession. Small wonder that Garcia and a former associate, Philippe Pottier, found themselves bewitched on their inaugural visit to the Rococo castle more than a decade ago. Fortuitously, they remembered a neglected spot at Champ du Bataille, about 100 metres from the château’s right flank, but just far enough out of sight to establish a new garden feature that would come as a surprise to wandering guests.
‘At first, the grotto was meant to be small, with water trickling over rocks, then it became massive,’ recalls one of Garcia’s closest friends, the Paris antiquaire Sylvain Levy-Alban. ‘It’s not exactly the Pantheon in Rome, but it is big. That’s the usual thing with Jacques: small projects balloon. And what looked initially like a mausoleum, at least to me, in its earliest stages, has become a magical space, a grotto ballroom of the Louis XIV period. When you enter, instead of feeling depressed, you feel very happy, even elated. It’s insane in a way.’ Surely the gardeners must have thought the same, given that they spent ten winters laying small stones under the direction of their leader.
Though the germ of the grotto was Bavarian, the interior is Garcia’s take on a French one, the Grotto of Tethys at Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre in the 1660s and demolished two decades later when Louis XIV required more domestic square footage and the palace was expanded. Some of Le Nôtre’s fittings were relocated to the park of Château de Saint-Cloud, specifically a group of stone statues of gods and goddesses; Garcia had them replicated in plaster for his project. ‘The royal grotto, with its vaults, niches and mirrors framed with basalt, was the basis of the interior decoration,’ the designer explains, noting that the Grotto of Tethys had been meticulously recorded in engravings by Jean Lepautre. ‘I wanted to create an amphitheatre of sorts with a central stage that is reminiscent of Elizabethan theatres, where the audience stood around the actors.’
Any director can tell you that a stage does not exist in a vacuum, and Garcia, impresario as much as aesthete, has already put his grotto to splendid use. ‘The idea is to make it a place for short and intimate performances,’ he says. Last year, to celebrate the folly’s completion, he hosted a party where performers in Roman garb and gilded masks disported themselves as a counter-tenor was accompanied by a cellist, and champagne flowed (‘Très Louis Quatorze,’ Levy-Alban, who was in attendance, dryly recalls.) A concert has followed, as well as a choir event in honour of an auction at Sotheby’s in May, where 75 of Garcia’s choicest treasures – from stone column drums, salvaged from the Palais des Tuileries after it was torched by the Paris Commune, to a bronze table of his design – went on the block in support of a foundation to keep Champ de Bataille, which is open to the public, in good nick for years to come. That includes the projects still on the septuagenarian’s drawing board or underway. Among the latter is a reproduction of Marie Antoinette’s Marlborough Tower at the Hameau de la Reine, complete with staircase to a rooftop view of Jacques Garcia’s paradise. As he once told Levy-Alban: ‘Why stop building when you can go on forever?’
Château du Champ de Bataille, 8 Route du Château, 27110 Sainte-Opportune-du- Bosc, France. Ring 00 33 2 32 34 84 34, or visit chateauduchampdebataille.com
A version of this article appears in the July 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
