The Japanese fashion king Kenzo is selling the oasis of calm he created in Paris. He takes our correspondent on a guided tour
The uniformity of the Parisian streetscape gives the city its style, atmosphere and formal charm – but who knows what exotic edifices lurk behind the homogeneous facades? Take one unremarkable 18th-century apartment building near Place de la Bastille, in central Paris.
Once inside the porte-cochère (the big street door typical of such buildings), you might notice the name Takada among the French surnames on the bank of grey metal letter boxes for the building’s residents – but that’s hardly a giveaway as to what is to come. Proceed into the communal courtyard and – what’s this? A wide, four-storey wooden facade, a bit like an enormous barn, forms the back wall of this paved space, though its small, irregularly placed windows offer no clue as to what’s inside.
Another huge set of doors in this structure leads down a tunnel-like passage to another courtyard, this one planted with towering stands of bamboo that reach to the top floor of the wooden house built around it. Paris has receded to vanishing point by the time I cross this second courtyard and enter a dimly lit hallway with Chinese screens, bowls of orchids and Buddha statues. Someone has lit an incense stick, and the aroma curls into my nostrils.
“Just to disorientate you a little more,” says a buff young PA with a cheeky twinkle, inviting me up the wooden stairs to meet his boss. Kenzo Takada – couture fashionista, homeware designer and per-fumier, whose name has been a global brand since the 1970s – comes shyly forward to say hello. The creative power-house who enlivened the Paris fashion scene with radical knitwear and ethnic and boho themes, and whose dramatic runway shows once included a live elephant, is today wearing checked Rupert Bear trousers and a cosy, chunky-knit fawn jumper. A grey streak in his black hair is the only indication that, although he looks about 45, he’s really 68. He speaks French in a deep, gruff voice, and, as we settle by the log fire in the main salon – one of the property’s six working fireplaces – he tells me the story of his remarkable home.
“I wanted a Japanese house and garden in Paris,” he recalls. “At the time, I was living in the 16th arrondissement, but that was not the right place – far too bourgeois. Here was more neutral.”
“Here” is the courtyard site in the 11th arrondissement that he found in 1986. It was an old industrial building with planning permission and typical of the neighbourhood’s then ungentrified state. “Here, I could build it all,” he says. “I thought it would take two years, but it took much longer.”
His French architect worked with his Japanese designer, but the unusual (for Paris) style and materials – all imported from Japan, right down to the rocks for the garden – were not without their difficulties. There was, for example, the challenge of constructing a waterfall and koi pond on the roof of a section of the ground-floor staff quarters. The revised completion date, 1990, also passed – “I had to move into a hotel” – and a new team of builders came in before finally, in 1993, it was finished.
The cost of creating 1,360 square metres of living space on four floors, plus a garden and several terraces, is not discussed, but – as with the exquisite collections of oriental, modern and ethnic art, ceramics and furniture – I think it’s safe to assume we’re in a financial ballpark where only someone whose name was synonymous with a global luxury brand would avoid losing serious sleep.
Not that there’s anything ostentatious about the place. Even in the first-floor grand salon – which is about 15 metres long, with its high, sloping ceiling, a swimming pool under a glass roof off one side and french windows onto the garden on the other – the feeling is of peace and harmony rather than a desire to create a flashy “wow” factor. Where some self-made icons plaster their homes with images reflecting their own glory, Kenzo prefers his collection of Buddhas to photos of himself with the great, the good or even Naomi Campbell, one of his favourite models.
Things get even more low-key when we remove our shoes and enter the Japanese teahouse built into one end of the house. It has tatami mats, sliding doors of wood and paper and a special tea-ceremony room, with a stove set in a hole in the floor. In summer, Kenzo likes to sleep on a futon in here, waking to the view of the garden, where the planting, running water and placement of the rocks were all done under the direction of a Japanese garden master. Huge golden koi swim lazily in the pond.
We carry on our tour, from level to level, up and down the pale wood staircases. No city sounds intrude, and the vistas through the windows are of thick screens of bamboo or decked terraces with more oriental-style planting. Only the occasional glance through a skylight brings the Parisian roof line into your field of vision. In room after room, many divided by sliding doors to make the internal space as adaptable as possible, modern European flourishes enliven an ordered Asian aesthetic. There is the merest hint of playful camp, such as a set of Louis-the-whatever gilt chairs upholstered in faux leopard fabric, which we come across in a seating area off the second-floor master bedroom. We find a huge square black-granite bath in a woodwalled bathroom, a steam room and plunge pool off the gym, two kitchens – in one, a young Japanese chef is doing something intricate with individual peeled grapes – more bedrooms, more bathrooms. Contemporary paintings share wall space with traditional Japanese art, groups of pale-green or grey or white ceramics are clustered together, Buddhas – especially crystal versions – are a theme throughout, and a 5ft-high Timorese woodcarving of a horse and rider does not seem out of place. Yet the effect is not an overwhelming assault on the senses, but more of a soothing embrace.
“And here,” Kenzo says, as we enter a second-floor mezzanine equipped with a desk and an easel, “is my atelier.” In this luxurious studio, overlooking the library, the man who has already focused his creative energy on clothes and homeware tells me he now wants to “learn to paint”.
But he won’t be doing it here. He plans to sell the retreat he took so long to create and move on. Travelling is on the agenda, there is an apartment in New York, and he will look for a smaller Paris home. “It’s exciting to find new things and make a new place with a different idea – but always with oriental tranquillity. I couldn’t live anywhere too minimalist – that would be cold. It needs to be sympa,” he concludes, with that essentially French word that combines elements of “agreeable”, “pleasant”, “comfortable” and “empathetic”.
So, who does Kenzo think will find this house sympa? “It would suit a young couple, or someone a bit artistic,” he says. “Not a typical family.”
Whoever buys it will need to be atypically loaded, too. The house is on the market for a cool £8.9m, which reflects its size, unique style and location, according to Nathalie Garcin, the selling agent. “The quartier has changed since the opera house opened on Place de la Bastille in 1989,” she says. “Many of the old workshops moved out, and lofts and apartments replaced them. And you only have to cross the boulevard and you’re on the super-chic Place des Vosges.”
What feels like a much longer journey is the space between Kenzo’s house of Zen-like tranquillity and the hard-edged bustle of even the smartest Paris street.
Kenzo Takada’s house is for sale for €12m, through the Paris office of Emile Garcin Immobilier; 00 33 1 42 61 73 38, www.emilegarcin-paris.com
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