Castel Henriette was a villa designed by the

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau ( ; ; ), Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and ...

architect

Hector Guimard Hector Guimard (, 10 March 1867 – 20 May 1942) was a French architect and designer, and a prominent figure of the Art Nouveau style. He achieved early fame with his design for the Castel Beranger, the first Art Nouveau apartment building i ...

Sèvres Sèvres (, ) is a French Communes of France, commune in the southwestern suburbs of Paris. It is located from the Kilometre zero, centre of Paris, in the Hauts-de-Seine department of the Île-de-France region. The commune, which had a populatio ...

, France, in 1899. It was completed in 1900 and modified in 1903 with the removal of the look-out tower, and was demolished in 1969.

Building

Guimard designed Castel Henriette for Mme. Hefty in 1899, the commission also including a secondary house, a garage and a fountain."Le Castel Henriette"
''L'Art nouveau.com'', retrieved 24 April 2018 . The site was gently sloping, with roads on three sides. Completed in 1900, the villa was one of a series of early residential projects in which he increasingly integrated interior and exterior into complete works of the "New Art". The exterior combined elements with medieval resonance; however in the interior, as he had at

Castel Béranger The Castel Béranger is a residential building with thirty-six apartments located at 14 rue de la Fontaine in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. It was designed by the architect Hector Guimard, and built between 1895 and 1898. It was the first res ...

, he left riveted girders visible in ceilings.Claude Frontisi
"Hector Guimard entre deux siècles"
''Vingtième Siècle'' 17 (January–March 1988) 51-61, p. 56 . Guimard also designed the layout of the garden, which had a bulge evoking in the plan the pupil of an eye, facing the main salon; the entrance was on one corner, at 30^o to the garden front. In 1903 Guimard removed the look-out tower, which had become unstable, and added a bow window on the façade facing Rue des Binelles. Castel Henriette fell into disuse before the Second World War, but during the 1960s was used as a setting in several films: ' (1963), '' La Ronde'' (1964), ''

La Métamorphose des cloportes ''La Métamorphose des cloportes'' is a 1965 French and Italian comedy crime film comedy directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre. Cast *Lino Ventura : Alphonse Maréchal *Charles Aznavour : Edmond Clancul * Irina Demick : Catherine Verdier * Maurice ...

'' (1965), ''

What's New Pussycat? ''What's New Pussycat?'' is a 1965 screwball comedy film directed by Clive Donner, written by Woody Allen in his first produced screenplay, and starring Allen in his acting debut, along with Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, Romy Schneider, Capuc ...

'' (1965) and ''

A Flea in Her Ear ''A Flea in Her Ear'' () is a play by Georges Feydeau written in 1907, at the height of the Belle Époque. The author called it a vaudeville, but in Anglophone countries, where it is the most popular of Feydeau's plays, it is usually described ...

'' (1968). The house was demolished in April 1969 despite efforts to save it. It has an entry in the

Base Mérimée The ''Base Mérimée'' () is the database of French monumental and architectural heritage, created and maintained by the French Ministry of Culture. It was created in 1978, and placed online in 1995. The database is periodically updated, and conta ...

, and furniture designed for it is in the collection of the

Bröhan Museum The Bröhan Museum is a Berlin State Museums, Berlin state museum for Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Functionalism (architecture), Functionalism, located in Berlin's Charlottenburg district. The museum is named after its founder, entrepreneur and ar ...

in Berlin and decorative elements in the collections of the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

in London and the

Musée d'Orsay The Musée d'Orsay ( , , ) () is a museum in Paris, France, on the Rive Gauche, Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts architecture, Beaux-Arts railway station built from 1898 to 1900. The museum holds mai ...

in Paris, which also has architectural plans and furniture designs and drawings.

Evaluations

Castel Henriette had historicising elements. Art historians have judged it variably. In 1962 Robert Schmutzler, a specialist in the development of the style, found it " eminiscentof the medievalistic robber-baron castles of the prosperous upper bourgeoisie" and judged that it "

ould Ould is an English surname as well as an element of many Arabic names. In Arabic contexts it is a transliteration of the word wikt:ولد, ولد, meaning "son". Notable people with this surname include: English surname * Edward Ould (1852–190 ...

scarcely be said to represent Art Nouveau at its best". In 1972

Dennis Sharp Dennis Sharp (30 November 1933 – 6 May 2010) was a British architect, professor, curator, historian, author and editor. His obituary in ''The Guardian'' stated that he 'was well-known as an architectural historian, teacher and active defender o ...

, while echoing this assessment in calling it a "pastiche", wrote that it does exemplify the "allegiance to eccentric asymmmetrical design" introduced by Art Nouveau, and in 1970 F. Lanier Graham saw it as representing "the highest flight of Guimard's architectural imagination", "a triumph of deliberate tensions", the first time he brought to architecture the "sense of spontaneous compression and release" he had previously developed in two dimensions. In 1978 it was similarly characterised as a "masterpiece" and the most explicit embodiment of the "underlying unease of Art Nouveau" and compared to "some inter-stellar object ... which appears to have landed on its site ... in a fortuitous way",''Hector Guimard'', text by Gillian Naylor and Yvonne Brunhammer, Architectural Monographs 2, London: Academy / New York: Rizzoli, 1978, , p. 54, including plans. and in 2006

Laurence des Cars Laurence des Cars (born Laurence Élisabeth de Pérusse des Cars on 13 June 1966) is a French museum curator and art historian. Since September 2021, she has served as director of the Louvre Museum, having previously headed the Musée d'Orsay an ...

called it "the high-water mark of Guimard's lyrical and oneiric idiom".

, "Fin de Siècle. Art Nouveau: The Rejection of Imitation: The architect and the city: Hector Guimard in Paris", in and Laurence des Cars, ed.

Henri Loyrette Henri Loyrette (born 31 May 1952 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris) was the chairman of Admical, a French organisation dedicated to corporate philanthropy, and the former director of the Louvre Museum (2001–2013). He became first curator a ...

, ''Nineteenth Century French Art'', 2006, English ed. trans. David Radzinowicz, Paris: Flammarion, 2007, , pp. 432–37, p. 436. Georges Vigne wrote in 1985 that it was "no doubt neither more successful nor more beautiful" than other works from what he called "Guimard's all-out baroque period", but that the tower made it "something at once playful and conspicuously original".Ferré, Rheims and Vigne, p. 199.

References

External links

* {{coord, display=title Art Nouveau architecture in France Works by Hector Guimard Buildings and structures in Hauts-de-Seine Residential buildings completed in 1900 Buildings and structures demolished in 1969 19th-century architecture in France