Cordelia de Castellane has been in the design business for a quarter of a century, which seems extraordinary given her age: 43. But the polished Parisian has been immersed in creative businesses since she was born. Her great-great-uncle was the celebrated neo-romantic architect Emilio Terry, who conjured elaborate interiors for Prince Rainier of Monaco and the shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos; the walls of Cordelia’s Paris house are lined with sketches by him. Her Greek mother, Countess Atalanta de Castellane, is an interior designer who regularly took her daughter around the world to see galleries, exhibitions, historic houses — and then handed her to Gilles Dufour, Karl Lagerfeld’s right-hand man at Chanel, for work experience. And her cousin, Victoire de Castellane, is the creative director of Dior Joaillerie. So in the fashion and design world, the young Cordelia was in a perfect position to soak up information and contacts.
She was also lucky enough to have been surrounded by beauty — in her family’s many houses around Europe, in her grandparents’ garden in Switzerland, where “I learnt there is nothing more beautiful than those mountains of flowers”, and then in her first jobs, working with Dufour at Chanel at the age of 15, followed by ten years at Emanuel Ungaro. It was this experience, in addition to her early immersion in French interiors, that, she believes, won her the biggest design job of her life: last year transforming the 12th-century Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, 45km southwest of Paris, into France’s first cool country-house hotel.
A living room in the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay
L’ABBAYE DES VAUX DE CERNAY
When Laurent de Gourcuff, the founder of Paris Society — a large collection of restaurants and clubs — approached de Castellane to turn the dilapidated abbey into a French version of Soho House, she had never designed anything bigger than a private home (including four of her own). She had transformed the little Ladurée tea shop in Paris into a peppermint-coloured, social-media-friendly boutique adorned with handpainted tiles and belle époque detail. She had created, with her cousin Ségolène Gallienne, the CdeC children’s clothing boutique, which led to her being headhunted in 2012 as the first artistic director of Baby Dior. Then, when that expanded into a worldwide business, she had helped to launch the first Dior Maison boutiques and filled them with suitably glamorous homeware, gifts and flowers.
But when she first saw the 4,800 sq m abbey, she admits, she did think it was “mad to take on a project like this”.
The pagoda at the abbey has been modernised with luminous reds by de Castellane
L’ABBAYE DES VAUX DE CERNAY
In the 19th century, the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay had been transformed into the summer home of the aesthete Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, who counted Honoré de Balzac, Henri Rousseau and Édouard Manet among her friends. After the Second World War the 185-acre estate had fallen on hard times. When de Castellane first saw it in 2023, she was faced not only with 55 run-down bedrooms but derelict outhouses and cottages and vast crumbling public spaces, ranging from a chapterhouse with gothic stone arches and soaring ceilings to an oratory still with its organ.
What gave de Castellane the courage to take the project on, she says, was the realisation that it was nothing new. She had lived in large, treasure-filled houses all her life. Her mother had always been a master of wild interiors, she says, mixing antiques and contemporary furniture, baroque mirrors and postmodern sofas, Moroccan rugs and Polish linens — and very, very bright colours. When de Castellane had decorated her own Paris apartment — which she shares with her banker husband, Igor de Limur, and four children aged between 15 and 25 — she instinctively filled the spaces with items heavy with historic references alongside fresh new designs: a Knole sofa once owned by Hubert de Givenchy with an 18th-century mirror, striped new India Mahdavi cushions below a vintage Fortuny chandelier, an antique Dutch table beside a leopard-print rug. “I realised my mother had done this sort of thing before and that I probably could too,” she says. “So although I had zero experience, I just went for it.”
Actually, she says with a laugh, “it was probably better not to have had the experience, as I would not have slept.” Her way of coping with the magnitude of the task was to treat it as she would a personal house, “giving it a glow while making it cosy and comfortable”. What she didn’t try to do is “decorate it. I don’t like houses that look decorated. When you go to a beautiful castle in England, you would never ask who did it. It’s just always been there, slightly transformed by the knowledge and tastes of subsequent generations.”
A corridor at the abbey showcases de Castellane’s love of pattern
L’ABBAYE DES VAUX DE CERNAY
The pagoda was originally designed for Baroness de Rothschild
L’ABBAYE DES VAUX DE CERNAY
Like her own houses, she has filled the abbey with bright colours, clashing patterns and joyful fabrics — some by French favourites such as Pierre Frey, others by her, mixing tartans with leopard print and rich jacquards with William Morris florals. Her brief was to make it — like many of England’s country house hotels, from the Pig and Soho Farmhouse to Beaverbrook — a fun, relaxed country home from home for Parisians.
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The fun bit wasn’t hard, she says. Two of her role models — her mother and Laura Ungaro, Emanuel’s wife — had taught her to be fearless when mixing patterns and colours. Hence the strawberry hue of the media room, alongside a patchwork of rainbow fabrics, or the lurid red velvets that enliven the big living room, or the bright red gloss with which she painted a lakeside pergola before lifting its interiors with jaunty red floral and striped fabrics.
When it came to actually installing all the objects she had amassed over the prior ten months — from markets, antique shops and junk shops all over France and Belgium — she used her gut feeling to decide where they went.
“I told the workmen, ‘Just put everything on the lawn and then we will try things. Forget the plan.’ If I’d told them that’s how I worked, they would have freaked out. But it is all about feeling: I put things where I feel it’s right. And it was!” Another trick, she admits, is not to look as if you’ve tried too hard. “Russell Sage taught me that,” she says, referencing the theatrical British designer of hotels such as the Goring and Fife Arms. And designers like Nicky Haslam and Robert Kime taught her how to “go big — or don’t do it at all”.
Maxim’s restaurant in Paris
ROMAIN RICARD
Another recent design project she couldn’t go too mad on — but could add her theatrical flair to — was Maxim’s, the legendary restaurant once owned by Pierre Cardin, which reopened in 2023 after a 14-year closure. This was the place where Brigitte Bardot had danced barefoot late into the night, where Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin had dined (and where she then had attempted to steal some crockery) and where the 1960s model Antonia had tried to enter with a live panther. It’s one of the most iconic restaurants on earth — as Parisian as the Eiffel Tower, as naughty as the Folies Bergère.
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When the Paris Society took over the restaurant in 2022, the art nouveau jewel was dusty and tired but, thanks to its 1979 listing as a historical monument, untouched. De Castellane was a natural choice to give it a €2 million spruce-up. Not only had she regularly been to private events there, but in 1978 her parents had thrown their wedding party in its decadent gold, red and black interiors.
All that the “rare and beautiful stone”, as she describes the restaurant, needed was a bit of love: its gold regilded, its art-nouveau stained-glass ceiling cleaned, its banquettes reupholstered in lipstick-red velvet, its carpets relaid with one of her trademark flower patterns — “I have to have flowers in every room” she says — and, in the fumoir, beneath a stained red and white glass chandelier by Louis Comfort Tiffany, a cheeky tiger-stripe rug laid to bring back a little of the naughtiness that had made the place an icon.
When we speak, she is not in Paris but en route to London to meet potential clients (and quickly pop in to see the Van Gogh show at the National Gallery — now sadly finished — and the Mughal exhibition at the V&A, for inspiration). It’s only a matter of time before her recognisably floral and wildly hued signature makes its mark on these shores too.
cordeliadecastellane.com; restaurant-maxims.com; abbayedesvauxdecernay.com; dior.com
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