The elaborate Christmas tablescape at Aline Asmar d'Amman’s apartment.
Photo: Kasia Matenska
How Aline Asmar d’Amman Decorates Her Paris Apartment for the Holidays
During the festive season, her home becomes a stage for multiple celebrations, with evocative decor conducive for imagination and meaningful conversations
Aline Asmar d'Amman at home in Paris. Photo: Kasia Matenska
Christmas spreads joy and invite for togetherness as we share memories and grow friendships, old and new around the table. Home becomes a stage for multiple celebrations, and I use this time to travel in place before leaving Paris for the Swiss mountains, staging an evocative decor conducive for imagination and meaningful conversations. I have wonderful memories of oversized Christmas trees and meticulously calibrated nativity scenes at my parents’ home in Lebanon. While I’ve never tried to recreate their vast and symbolic dimensions, I invoke the Christmas spirit with a very personal language, creating subtle correspondences with the contemporary artworks and furniture that punctuate my interior.
This year I placed my favorite oversized vintage candelabra studded with crystals next to The Power of Love photograph by Roger Moukarzel that grounds my entrance. This visual oxymoron – is my daily mantra and resonates more than ever with the state of the world. Thanks to Pierre Banchereau (Debeaulieu), my house is the theater of incessant experimental floral arrangements. We often talk about creativity as an act of resistance. A case in point is this bouquet of flamboyant amethyst-colored branches, evoking my stone of choice, symbol of passion and love.
The gorgeous fireplace has been decorated in the festive spirit. Photo: Kasia Matenska
d'Amman setting the table. Photo: Kasia Matenska
The party room’s haussmannien red marble chimney is all dressed up with a floral haute-couture train of tinted foliage that spills over the foot of Voukenas Pétridès’s gilded bronze seat, half elephant head, half biomorphic throne, in permanent conversation with the golden pendulum by Swiss architect Alphonse Laverrière. Candlelight reflects and flickers on all surfaces, from the hand-painted glass tabletops and the mirror walls and ceilings.
The festive tablescape. Photo: Kasia Matenska
The Power of Love photograph by Roger Moukarzel at the entry. Photo: Kasia Matenska
On my dining table, the Christmas seasonal decorations echoes large Venetian baubles found in Murano’s antique market. The room recently welcomed the long-awaited arrival of a strangely magnificent bench by artist Casey McCafferty, in dark carved wood and sculpted stone. Casey created this piece for me based on a photo of my two boys tangled in their embrace and our amusing exchanges about the family spirit. Antique heirloom tableware, chiseled crystal glassware and candle holders mingle with my cherished contemporary plates with the word Beirut handwritten in a subtly ornate frieze, by my friend Rabih Kayrouz for the Raynaud manufacture.
A detail of the tablescape. Photo: Kasia Matenska
Nothing pleases me more than combining the French spirit with the generosity and abundance of my origins’ traditions. On the napkins, velvet ribbons rest on small conversational books associated with each guest and friend. Coasters serve as crystal plates, allowing the stones to work their perennial magic. The Christmas tree is none other than a sovereign branch leaning over the table. In the backdrop reflection of the wall mirror, the branch seems to graze the barbed-wire wave, a spectacular artwork commissioned to artist Abdul Rahman Katanani, anchoring the living room in wonderment and grace.
As a nativity scene, I pull out a tiny treasure that was hiding in the attic of our Swiss family house: a miniature cave naturally carved into an agate stone is adorned with absolutely delicate gold miniature “santons”. There’s no recipe for successful Christmas decorating. In the wide creative realm of interior design, decorating means enchanting. And enchantment is all about magical stories of old world and future connexions that come together with a powerful grace.
Cover: The elaborate Christmas tablescape at Aline Asmar d'Amman’s apartment.
Photo: Kasia Matenska
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