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A deeply learned alumnus of Paris’s rigorous École Camondo school, Robert Couturier can do consummate period-French style with his eyes closed. But he’d rather not. “It’s a wasteful and vain exercise,” he says. “We no longer live that way.” Instead the Paris-born, Manhattan-based conjurer of buildings, interiors, and gardens from America to Azerbaijan (he’s constructing a 100,000-square-foot palace near Baku) likes to walk on the wild side. With a mix-master approach he calls “sensual, experimental, and witty,” Couturier composes rooms that are bracing essays in contemporary connoisseurship, confidently seasoned with historical elements (rare antiques, hand-carved boiserie), conversation-piece art, exquisite fabrics in saturated colors, and unexpected objets de vertu that establish a patina of globe-trotting sophistication. Being adventuresome is Couturier’s stylistic wont. As he explains, “I detest anything that takes itself too seriously.”
All in all, Robert Couturier can be said to lend a sense of connoisseurship, imagination, and even experimentation to the traditional design landscape. As he likes to say himself, recalling the rich interiors in which he spent his childhood and youth, “It is to both grander and greater ends that one invents when one can start with one’s own past.”
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Robert Couturier