The Chic French Furniture Designers Taking Inspiration from an Italian Castle

In the firm’s lofty showroom just off the Place des Victoires, ivory is the prevailing color and serenity is the dominant mood. A sofa and coffee table pairing evokes the work of French design innovators of the ’40s and ’50s—perhaps Jean Royère and Charlotte Perriand, most decisively—while responding to current tastes for rounded silhouettes, scaled-up dimensions and starkly neutral palettes.

Increasingly, Rose says, the partners have witnessed their designs blending almost too successfully into the multiline furniture galleries where they are sold. And so for the company’s latest introductions, launching this month, they decided to flip the narrative.

In the summer of 2022, they traveled south to the medieval-era Montecalvello castle, on the fringes of Italy’s Lazio region northwest of Rome. Amid cavernous rooms and frescoed walls whose limpid, vegetal hues come alive in the warm afternoon light, they imagined the brand’s seating, tables and storage pieces taking on a more rarefied presence: no longer character actors blending in, but the main event.

Back in Paris, the three partners began designing new pieces to complement the monumental setting. Materials and finishes on a handful of existing furnishings were updated to cohere with the castle’s timeworn rooms—pockmarked walls suggested travertine rather than satiny marble for a coffee table; muted pigments yielded subtle velvets on a comma-shaped sofa.

The castle contributed a colorful script of its own. In 1970, it was acquired by the Polish-French painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, 1908–2001), known for his large-format portraits and interior landscapes with a Surrealist, often sexually suggestive edge. A collector of out-of-the way houses, the bigger the better, Balthus stayed at Montecalvello on and off for years, overseeing a gradual restoration of its frescoes. He eventually passed ownership to his two sons, Stanislas (“Stash”) and Thadée Klossowski de Rola, who both maintain apartments in the castle today. Their father’s top-floor studio remains untouched.

Balthus came across Montecalvello and its frescoes while living in Rome. In 1961, France’s minister of culture at the time, André Malraux, appointed him director of the French Academy there, and during his 16-year tenure, the artist directed a conservation of its residence within the Villa Medici, which included a suite of historic wall paintings. Did one frescoed setting lead to another?  

Last fall, the team loaded up a truck with the new designs and drove south, where the services of a tractor were required to cart the pieces up to the castle entrance. “We all appreciated the love [Balthus] poured into this place,” Rose says, explaining what she and her partners had seen in Montecalvello, and the artist’s still-palpable intentions, from the start.

The team is now at work on a late-summer pop-up in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where a residence designed by Jacqueline Morabito near the Provençal village will spotlight a new outdoor furniture offering, the company’s first. Also in the works are beds, a marble series and more of the seating options at which they excel, such as the Polus armchairs—stars of the Montecalvello installation with their sled-shaped oak bases—and the pleasingly blocky lounge chair they call the Fumoir.

“We made one in lacquer for Montecalvello,” Rose says with a smile. “We are cheeky like that sometimes.” The contrast must have been striking—glossy meringue finish against ancient Italian walls. But every good story needs a twist.