The Remix Has Arrived
It’s the first time since the Revolution that the building has been open to the bourgeoisie. Hôtel de la Marine is one of two matching blocks embracing immaculate symmetry like battalions on parade. These twin palaces form the northern side of the great set piece that is Place de la Concorde. Behind those golden walls, Première Dame d’Honneur Brigitte Macron would later admire the couture interior. There was plenty of raw material to choose from – this used to be the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne (Crown Furniture Storage). The building was designed by Louis XV’s architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel and completed by 1774. Its restoration and decoration has cost a cool €135 million – a collaboration of State and commerce. Jamaica born Architectural Association trained Paris based architect Hugh Dutton’s pyramidal glazed roof over the Cour de l’Intendant transforming that space from a courtyard to an atrium is the only significant contemporary intervention.
Visitors enter the first floor museum through an arch in the arcade lining Place de la Concorde into Cour d’Honneur and onwards through a vestibule into Cour de l’Intendant. The former courtyard is still open to the cottony clouded sky and all four storeys plus dormered attic are fully visible: the attic floor of the street fronts is concealed by tympani filled pediments flanking balustrades over a cornice. There are two distinct parts to this museum: the vast public rooms overlooking Place de a Concorde to the south and the private office and double apartment of the Intendant of the Garde-Meuble which occupy the righthand three bay pedimented projection of the south front and most of the east front overlooking Rue St Florentin.
The interior of the office and double apartment is a tale of two citizens. Chief Architect of Historic Monuments Christophe Bontineau led the restoration with an innovative approach of drawing on the differing tastes of the last two Intendants of the Garde-Meuble, the decadent Pierre-Élisabeth de Fontanieu and the religious Marc Antoine Thierry de Ville d’Avray. Decorators Joseph Achkar and Michel Charrière got to work under the discreet and watchful eyes of past residents. Restoration included peeling back up to 18 layers of paint to uncover original colourways. Jean-Henri Riesener masterpieces were returned from the Louvre and Versailles. Madame Thierry de Ville d’Avray’s Polonaise bed and matching dog bed were spruced up. Monsieur de Fontanieu’s bath with hot running water supplied by an overhead tank hidden above the ceiling was reinstated.
The Marine (Ministry for Naval Affairs) took over the building in 1789 and occupied it for the next 226 years. In 1798 the Garde-Meuble was abolished. The Salon d’Honneur and the Salon des Amiraux were carved – all that multicoloured marquetry – out of the Galerie des Meubles in the 1840s to the design of Naval architect Xavier Lefèvre. Thus the south front was reinvented as a suite of Versailles standard state rooms for naval occasions. Running parallel with this suite are the interconnecting Galeries des Ponts de Geurre and Doreé naturally lit by windows onto Cour d’Honneur.
After the golden extravagance of the state rooms, salons extraordinaire blurring into one magnificence, an enfilade of mirrored dreams, there’s a refreshingly plain anteroom off the Office of the Chief of Staff which leads onto the balcony overlooking Place de la Concorde. The reductivist simplicity of the anteroom’s chimneypiece is 19th century neoclassicism at its sleekest. Intersecting lines, receding and projecting, manipulating light and shadow. A clarion call of the beginning of modernism heralding a new era yet to come. The balcony – oh là là! All 11 bays of it between double height Corinthian columns framing views of the Obelisk of Luxor, the Eiffel Tower, Le Petit Palais and the Jardine des Tuileries. Hôtel de la Marine Paris and its balcony: the rich relative of Buckingham Palace London.
