EMPIRE DESIGN™: Hermes

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Of Far Away Places: Tunisia, Hammamet, Leila Menchari

This 1920's garden and house in Tunisia remains a beloved destination for its owner, Hermes design director Leila Menchari who faithfully maintains its free spirited aesthetic. The house and its grounds, photographed by Guillaume de Laubier, were featured in the Australian edition of Vogue Living of August 2003. The garden is also the subject of a book that I have used as a reference, 'A Garden at Hammamet' co authored by Michael Tournier, Barbara Wright and Leila Menchari.

the front entrance of Dar Henson, owned by Leila Menchari,
photographed by Guillaume de Laubier
(click for a much larger view)

As a young girl, Leila Menchari wandered up from the hot sands of a beach in Tunisia and, led on by a black cat, found herself in the cool green depths of an enchanting garden. Palms rustled overhead, creating shafts of light. Earth paths led through a tangle of exotic plants - cactus, eucalyptus, agave; the air was scented with datura, white oleander and jasmine.

A pool in the gardens of Dar Henson,
at the end of which sits a columned dovecote.
photographed by Guillaume de Laubier

This magical garden belonged to Jean and Violet Henson, a bohemian Anglo-American couple of aristocratic bearing who had settled in Hammamet in 1925 following a life of adventure full of travel and art with friends including Man Ray, Cocteau, Berard and Serge Lifar. Their home, Dar Henson, was a low white washed house of colonnaded courtyards and spacious rooms, surrounded by a series of gardens filled with fountains and scattered throughout the lush foliage were ancient roman columns and pediments, part of Jean and Violet’s extensive collection of antiquities from Carthage and other archeological sites.

a lily pool at Dar Henson across which one can see the Gulf of Hammamet
photographed by Guillaume de Laubier

This experience was to Leila Menchari's life, she would eventually become the Hanson’s spiritual daughter. She was fascinated by them, absorbing all their otherness and their world of eclectic treasures culled from their travels and the friends they made along the way. In their double height living room, heirloom furnishings were paired with lamps by Giacometti; photographs by Horst and their extensive collection of books, while drawings by Christian Berard and other notable artists hung along the hallway’s pale lilac walls.

The garden's cultured artistic owners became Leila's mentors, encouraging her to study painting at the l’école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 1977 she has been responsible for concocting the most alluring window displays for the Maison Hermès store in Paris. I refer to the Polyglot, who writes that generations of Parisians, and those who regularly make the trip to Paris, will tell you that Hermès’ store windows are meant to make you dream. That is why crowds jostle for position to catch a glimpse of the fantastic scenarios crafted out of silk, coral and leather that are a voyage into the imagination of their creator, Leila Menchari. Her poetic displays have included a huge origami horse that looked as if it had been created from one of Hermès famous silk scarves, gazelles grazing amongst stacks of fine china piled high with colorful macaroons and Tuareg jewelry laid out on petrified wood that recalled the African Sahara.

I patiently await the delivery of a second hand edition of ' Tales of a Wanderer' by the author who is described as Maison Hermes Visual Magician

I make this post in anticipation of its arrival:

The gilded Hammamet story started in the 1920s with Georges Sebastian, a Romanian millionaire businessman with aristocratic connections, who purchased nine acres of land just along the beach from Hammamet's medina, creating a villa that Frank Lloyd Wright was to call "the most beautiful home I have ever seen". George Sebastian was an extravagant man. During the 1920s and 30s he partied like no one else on the north coast of Africa, and his hospitality to people like Gide, Klee and Beaton inspired other members of the fast set to set up home in Hammamet.

It's a fashion that has continued to this day. In 1966 the American painter David Dulavey built Dar Dulavey - Dar is an Arabic term denoting a house, but not just any old house, usually the most distinctive dwelling in its part of the town. In 1974 the Italian architect Tony Facella Senso created Dar Senso in the old medina. The former Italian prime minister, Benito Craxi, was a near neighbour. Nowadays the popularity of this Tunisian resort has got out of hand. For three miles south of Hammamet stretch the boulevards of a newly-built Hammamet Sud with 47 Las Vegas-style themed hotels. Here you can stay in mock-Roman opulence, in a pseudo-Greek temple or a Moorish theme park with hookah pipes and Turkish baths, all safely controlled by security guards and electronic gates. Luckily, old Hammamet survives to the north, at the neck of the Cap Bon Peninsula.

It is still possible to travel to the ancient walled medina to find what drew Americans like Wallis Simpson, Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Once upon a time this was the place where European and American artists came to discover themselves. Paul Klee came here in 1914, confessing breathlessly in his diary, "Colour and I are both one: I am a painter!" Andre Gide visited too, The Sitwells also trekked out to tranquil Hammamet before World War II, as did Cecil Beaton and Baron Hoyningen-Heune, chief fashion photographer for Harpers and Vogue during the interwar period. The stars of the Comedie Francaise built their summer homes there as did American socialites like John Henson and his British wife Violet, who were later to foster the talents of the inimitable Leila Menchari.

Dar Othman via commons.wikimedia

It is possible to get an inside view of life among the 1930s glamour crowd with a visit Dar Sebastian, the villa that George Sebastian designed and built with the assistance of a local mason - who used nothing more sophisticated than a series of rods to make his calculations - is open most days and accessible from the Avenue des Nations Unis. Purchased for the state by President For Life Habib Bourgiba, it is now the Centre Culturel International D'Hammamet. Admission costs two dinars, visitors are free to wander and there is an informal cafe service run by the side of George Sebastian's marble swimming pool.

Because of the high standard set by George Sebastian, the vision encapsulated in some of the villas of the 20's and 30's is breathtaking, especially those which occupy the eastern wall of the medina and face out towards the Gulf of Hammamet. From the outside they are simple and with white walls, blue-painted doors, traditional cupolas, the only sign of the electronic age being the vast variety of antennae, dishes and aerials on the roof tops. Most of these houses are still privately owned, and it takes a personal letter of recommendation to get a look. One or two are available to rent, but the rates exclude all but the seriously wealthy: Dar al Qamar, for example, comes complete with servant and cook for a sum in excess of £10,000 a month.

the tiled floor at the Dar el Medina, via Flickr

the Dar ben Abdallah via commons.wikimedia

Dar el Medina stairs, via Flickr

Dar el Bey, via Lamsin Cultural Programme

Despite Leila Menchari's career, her travels and the fascinating people she’s met along the way, Princess Grace of Monaco and General Charles De Gaule to name a few, Menchari considers her most important role to be that of the keeper to the Hanson’s legacy. After Violet’s death, Leila watched over Jean, who eventually bequeathed their villa to her. Today she is just as devoted to the villa and its gardens, which inspired the perfume she created for Hermès, "Jardin en Méditerranée". Every summer, when Hermès reluctantly spares her for a month, she returns to Hammamet to reconnect with her past and remember where her dreams first took root. She is quoted as saying that she still thinks of herself as "just a guest" and says "I'm caught between two civilizations, two coasts of the Mediterranean. I bridge that gap". She continues to maintain the garden in all its untamed exuberance, with its broken columns, ancient stones, huge terracotta urns and random paving. Plants find their own way to survive. Lizards, frogs and birds make it as much their home as hers. Peacocks wander the terraces of Dar Henson and roman architectural fragments form the Henson's tomb.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Musing On: Oranges and Penguins

Over the last few days EmpireLady has determined the need for
a therapeutic dose of orange....

the perfect antidote to winter misery?

EmpireLady is so pleased with the orange trees outside her windows. The trees are a great source of fascination, evocative of distant memories of the fruit that used to appear at Christmas time, wrapped individually in purple tissue paper.

A text on the Psychology of Colour states 'orange is shown to have only positive affects on your emotional state. This colour relieves feelings of self-pity, lack of self-worth and unwillingness to forgive. Orange opens your emotions and is a terrific antidepressant'.

Perhaps this affection for orange has crept up on EmpireLady
as she recalls french doors, curtained with 70's Hicks linen

However, now fully dosed with its forgiveness promoting properties,
EmpireLady has made a visual list of all things orange:

available via Penguin

Ever since the creation of the first Penguin paperbacks in 1935, their jackets have become a constantly evolving part of Britain's culture and design history. The books have become design classics. All of the following are available through Bloomsbury

Available through Bloomsbury

EmpireLady's favourite fellow orange-obsessive Margaret Olley is perhaps Australia's most prized interior and still life painter who, at 86 years of age, continues to demonstrate a fierce disregard for trends and fashion. Her exquisite compositions of flowers, fruit and objects have an inherent grace, the arrangements are always elegant and the objects always beautiful. She first came to public attention as the beguiling subject of Dobell's portrait which took the Archibald prize in 1948, these days both the portrait and the lady are regarded as national treasures. Is Miss Olley a testament to the therapeutic properties of the hue for improving the temperament? The interview posted below illustrates the question:

"There is no more passionate supporter of the arts in this country than the indefatigable, ever-inspirational Margaret Olley," Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, said in 2006, when Miss Olley was honoured in the Queen's Birthday list for her services to art. At the time it was estimated that she had given the Art Gallery of NSW 130 works worth about $7 million, including important lithographs by Picasso, Cezanne and Bonnard. In 2005 she donated a colour drawing by Edouard Vuillard which she had expressly purchased for the gallery.

Late last year on September 19 it was announced that Margaret Olley had signed a personal cheque for $1 million to enable Edmund Capon to secure Paul Cezanne's post-impressionist painting 'Bords De La Marne' for $16.2 million for the Art Gallery of NSW. "I told him before he went on holiday that if he found a Cezanne I would give him a million dollars," she says. The money was the proceeds from her latest exhibition, kept in an art trust for this purpose. Miss Olley, now 86, has been a prolific patron of the visual arts throughout her life and this donation is perhaps her most dramatic gesture, done in public to inspire others also to donate to the cause. About 85 per cent of the price of the painting has been raised so far. She has also donated either her own work or examples from her private collection to regional and metropolitan galleries throughout her life, usually without any fanfare.

In an age where investing in art has become a national obsession, here is someone who happily gives hers away. Her paintings are now in the blue-chip category but she still prefers a simple life, part of her philosophy for happiness. Miss Olley comes from a humble background, being raised near Lismore during the Depression. As a young child she remembers not getting any pocket money unless she made her bed. As a student in Sydney she paid her way through art school by grape-picking and painting theatre sets for two shillings and sixpence an hour. "I learned generosity at my mother's knee," she says. "My mother and father were the most generous people. My father caught more fish than we ever needed, so he gave the rest away to neighbours. He grew his own vegetables, so he gave them away as well. I learned from them that giving is much better than receiving."

She has had periods of great struggle. She once bought a small property near Newcastle and paid it off through her painting. This was before her work sold for anything close to today's values and she came close to losing the place. She can recall sleeping with the cheque-book open next to her so that she wouldn't forget to make the next repayment. "I worked hard to make myself independent by painting ..... if you're doing what you want to do, it doesn't cost much to live."

Miss Olley states "As you get older, you move to a point where you can give back to society .... the world would be a much better place if all the retired teachers, accountants, plumbers and butchers were encouraged to give back a little bit of their knowledge to society." Giving back is what she has done by helping fund the acquisition of the Cezanne painting. She calls it the most important work in the gallery and hopes it will inspire a new generation of artists in the same way that his work inspired her as a young woman. She sees it as a great investment in social as well as financial terms. "My donation is just the beginning," she says. "I hope that everyone gives what they can."

Biggest break When I came down from Lismore and went to East Sydney Tech [now the National Art School].

Biggest achievement Handing over the money for the Cezanne is the most important thing I have done. I've never written a cheque for a million before. I had to ask Edmund: how many 0s?

Biggest regret None. Regrets are a waste of time.

Best investment Friendships. Unfortunately I've always preferred the company of older people, so that makes it pretty difficult at my age.

Worst investment Buying that property in Newcastle, I suppose. I'm much happier living here in Sydney.

Attitude to money It's only paper, isn't it?

Personal philosophy I don't understand the current obsession with the "me" and the "I". The best way to exist is to forget about yourself and just get on with it.