Villa Majorelle: two initials for a house

The land came from her family. Majorelle bought it from his mother-in-law, Mme Kretz, in the Médreville district. To build, he went to an architect he had met in Paris, Henri Sauvage, and entrusted the supervision of the work to Lucien Weissenburger. The house was completed in 1902.

Nothing here aims at symmetry. The Savonnières and Euville stones were laid without being sorted by shade, and the wall shifts from white to blond from one block to the next. Steeply pitched slate gables crown it, between striped chimneys. Under the tallest, a large arched window lights the studio where Majorelle painted. A wooden balcony juts out right beside it; lower down, green-painted iron brackets carry the one on the upper floor.

Stoneware takes over from the iron. The ceramicist Alexandre Bigot supplied the terrace balustrade: small, squat arcades in ocher and water green, where the glaze flowed like sap. At the end, the pier flares into a sheaf of leaves and finishes in an openwork scroll. Not a single straight line.

Majorelle lives surrounded by his own furniture. The ironwork, the paneling and the furniture come from his workshops; the stained-glass windows are by Jacques Gruber. In a frame of red wood, a painted frieze unrolls a barnyard: a turkey fanning its tail, a white goose, pigeons in flight in front of a trellis heavy with grapes. In the salon, Jane played the piano.

The villa then lost the people who gave it its name. Jane died first, Louis fourteen years after her. In 1931 it was sold to the State, which set up offices there, and the furniture was scattered. The bedroom furniture resurfaced fifty years later at a sale in Monaco, where it was bought back for Nancy. The City, now the owner of the house, restored it. Since 2020, the furniture of Jane and Louis’s bedroom has been back in its place.