Step Inside the Many Majestic Homes of Karl Lagerfeld

When Lagerfeld died in 2019, it fell to Sotheby’s to organize a vast sale of his possessions, which involved staging a series of live and online auctions in Paris, Monaco, and Cologne, Germany. It also gave rise to Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Houses (Thames & Hudson), a substantial volume available in January. “When Sotheby’s asked me to write a foreword to one of the sales catalogues, I realized that Lagerfeld’s interiors told an extraordinary history of taste from the 1950s to now,” says Mauriès, a writer and publisher who first met the designer in the late ’70s. “But no one had ever put them all together.” While Mauriès has done a spectacular job of gathering the visual documentation, Kalt has provided detailed text with help from a battery of experts, including designer Jacques Grange and Galerie Kreo founders Clémence and Didier Krzentowski.

For the latter pair, who run one of the leading contemporary design galleries in Paris, Lagerfeld was among their hungriest clients. He aspired to own complete collections. No, they once told him, he couldn’t acquire every edition of every work from an exhibition of Konstantin Grcic.

“Karl had a perpetual need for change; it fed his curiosity,” says Kalt, who, as a former editor of Architectural Digest France, knew both the designer and his houses. “He would find a new place, reimagine it, furnish it down to the last detail in a compulsive accumulation of furniture and objects.” Along the way, he romped through styles, including Swedish Grace and Memphis—always with the same dedication to aesthetic duty. A vibrant drawing room in his villa La Vigie in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, had walls lined with rose-red damask, gilded furniture, and a white marble bust of Madame de Pompadour. Later, at 17 quai Voltaire, he knocked down most of the walls and created a spaceship-like interior in concrete, resin, and glass. This Paris apartment, which was also one of his final homes, was Lagerfeld as interior design: an exaggeration in black and white.

“His constant was the 18th century, and the Art Deco works of Louis Süe and André Mare,” says Mauriès. “He loved contemporary pieces, but he was really obsessed by the French art de vivre, the perfection and glamour. He was until the end still a German—one addicted to an ineffable French sense of style.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2023 Winter Issue under the headline “Houses of Style.” Subscribe to the magazine.