The June (2010) issue of W magazine featured a pictorial on the nearly completed Moroccan residential complex of former Christian Dior/Shiseido cosmetic artist and renowned perfumer Serge Lutens, who has spent much of the past thirty-five years (and counting) designing, building (and re-building in some cases) and furnishing this wondrous and beautiful manse.
Lutens doesn’t live in the house, or really use it for any practical purpose, preferring to live and work out of his small one room apartment nearby. A project of this scale, passion and devotion – a purely aesthetic expression – seems more a working out of something in the psyche. Reading the article and viewing the awe-inspiring detail that has gone into every detail of every room put me in mind of Jung’s house at Bollingen, which he built himself over the course of thirty-odd years on the property where he lived with his family in Switzerland.
Lutens project is like something from a dream. The rooms don’t seem like rooms of a house in the sense we think of rooms in a house. This house is so beautifully sanctuarial, protective, inward looking – a seeming expression, that even Lutens describes as a kind of a “mania,” of his own reclusive, introverted nature and creative mind.
(Click on the link above to see all of the photos.)