In mid-construction now, a palace and pool house in Azerbaijan.
Some people build sandcastles. SoHo-based interior designer Robert Couturier builds castles in the sand. Literally, right now, in Azerbaijan, 100,000 square feet large. He builds and designs palaces, too, and 65,000-square-feet villas in Mexico and France with gardens as manicured as Versailles and rooms as grand as music halls.
His clients own art by old masters and furniture bought for kings as gifts to other kings. They live in houses built by Astors. Some come from families as old as time. Others are manufactures, oligarchs and heirs to pharmaceutical empires.
For 15 years, through the roaring 1980s, he was the personal designer and architect for Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, one of the wealthiest men on Earth. During that span, he built and designed over 15 homes for the British and French industrialist financier. An early Couturier client loved tassels. The designer found four for him once, each, he would find out later, the price of a Porsche.
Jeanne Noonan for New York Daily News
Designer/ architect Robert Couturier in his SoHo loft on an antique Indian shawl.
We had been friends a very long time, says Couturier. I told him before we started working together that he had to deal with all prices, that I would just pick things and he would get the bills. I remember going to his house when we were all done and he told me that the tassels each cost the price of a luxury automobile. If he loves tassels and can afford them, he should own them. In his defense, they were incredibly beautiful tassels. Silk threads with wooden beads the size of pearls made by hand by nearly blind monks in the depths of Brittany. Stunning.
You would think Couturier would be a pompous bore flitting around carrying handbags for the 1 percent. But hes not. He works only with clients he likes, who give their money for good causes, and who have taste. He walks to work and could be at home in a well-furnished cave as long his boyfriend and four beloved Shih Tzus were along for the ride. He loves Facebook, and his posts are more about his love and likes than design. Unlike other desig ners who work for people with more money than royalty, Couturier is unafraid to speak his mind. He operates as if he has nothing to lose.
Emmanuelle de le Pervenche
At 32, Courturier designed this Mexican palace for Sir Jimmy Goldsmith.
Most people today take a basic track house and blow it up 100 times to the size of a palace and they think they live in this great house, but its still a track house, he says of the mega-mansions of today. I wont work with those people. They have no taste. A home needs to be a reflection of who you are, not who you think you have to be. I remember doing a house once. It was 50,000 square feet or something. All the family ever used was the kitchen. It made me ill. Please, use more than one room.
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