When the bride’s bouquet has been thrown and the final centerpiece cleared from the banquet table, where does Christian Tortu, designer of floral backdrops for royal weddings, Paris fashion shows, the Cannes film festival and Marshall Field’s Spring Flower Show, go to restore the vital creative sap in his own veins?
The master of spontaneous elegance, who is different from other international floral designers for breaking traditional flower-arranging rules and designing arrangements of unexpected plants in astonishing combinations of colors and forms, boards a fast train in Paris and heads for his country home in Provence.
No ordinary getaway, Tortu’s house is a treasure that has survived intact from the 17th Century. Measuring 3,600 square feet, it stands flush with the street in the middle of this ancient Gallo-Roman village noted for its surrounding flower fields, four-star inns and colorful vintage ambience.
Marshall Field’s buyers, visiting there for the nearby flea market, were so enchanted they asked Tortu, 48, to design a likeness of his French countryside villa for their 2002 spring flower show, which closed earlier this month. Called “Pro-vence in Bloom,” the show transformed the windows at Field’s State Street and Water Tower stores into large Impressionist “paintings” of elegant gardens rich in fragrant roses, lavender and calla lilies, accented with exquisite statuary, fountains and architecture unique to Provence.
If the storefront windows could be so beguiling, we wondered what Tortu’s real maison must be like. Not having a ticket on the Concorde, we talked the designer into taking us on a virtual tour of the grounds and 23 rooms of his three-story home. This rustic but large house is named the Hotel de Bournissac, because it was once the residence of the Bournissac family, owners of many farms and fields in the area.
One of the house’s main attractions for him is the very rare, original wallpapers dating from the early 18th Century.
Tortu speaks of them with great pride, along with the fact that because of them, the house is classified as a historical monument by the French government. This means Tortu can’t change a thing without their permission.
“When I bought the house, it was totally intact. Nobody had touched it,” says Tortu, author of “Sensational Bouquets: Arrangements by a Master Floral Designer” (Abrams, $45). He was able to move right in. Once he did, the French officials did too. “A lot of experts come to see this house, a lot of people are coming to explain how we have to restore things, such as the wallpapers.
“We have to refresh, not to redo.”
The Provencal garden
Another major attraction for him is the courtyard in the back of the house, enclosing a garden filled with lemon, fig, palm and other Mediterranean trees. The high walls are covered with fragrant jasmine, especially pleasing to Tortu who loves all perfume flowers.
But the garden has a practical side. It provides “all type of herbs–basil, rosemary, thyme.
“It is Provence,” Tortu says with a shrug. “When we cook, we just go quickly to the courtyard, cut some thyme and put it in the rabbit.”
His kitchen is “rustic and filled with antiquities,” with two large casement windows opening onto the garden.
The kitchen is painted a special green one finds only in Provence, he says, one that contains a little bit more yellow than most greens. “I like it very much. I mix the paint a little different green for the walls, the ceiling, the doors, with a little bit more khaki–a restful color.”
Another typical Provence color is ochre, a dark yellow, which he uses along a long gallery opening onto the garden. Many houses and walls in the small village are painted this color. “Even the soil is that color,” he says. “We have a special village, Roussillon, where they make all the pigments for the painters, where they get all these special colors.” This is where he collected the pigments for his house.
Panoramic views
Other rooms on the first floor are the dining room and a big salon. The dining room walls are covered with the most precious of the papers, a black-and-white panoramic vista called a grisaille, representing the pleasures of the city and the countryside of the region. The wallpaper is handmade, printed with 2,000 blocks in the old French tradition by Zuber & Cie., renowned French wallpaper manufacturer. This wallpaper is famous for being one of the only panoramics ever made by Zuber, says Tortu. All rooms on this floor have the original stone floors.
“We have a big, long table and chairs, and a candelabra, all from the flea market. A sideboard to put all the butters and bread, and a big buffet in front of the wall to put all the plates and glasses. Everything is handmade with a lot of history, very alive.”
The second floor contains another big salon or living room surrounded by six bedrooms where guests stay. The floor on the second floor is the original from the 17th Century and is made of tomettes en terre cuite (little terra cotta red bricks originating from Provence).
There is a wonderful stone stairway in the foyer or entrance connecting the floors, created in the 17th Century in the Louis XIV style, but very rustic. The stairway from the second to the third floor is of wood.
“On the third floor, there are more rooms, but we haven’t done anything with them yet,” he says. “Perhaps one day, we will open the third floor and do something–create a workshop or a room to paint or play music.”
Total perfection
Of all 23 rooms, which is his favorite? “When I’m alone I spend a lot of time in my bibliotheque, or library. This is an oval room, dating from the 18th Century, built by Sencon de Bournissac inside the original 17th Century walls of the house, which makes it unique,” says Tortu.
“The library is totally perfect. This is an oval room. It opens on the garden, very comfortable, with books and magazines and music. This is where I like to stay.”
The room’s furnishings are spare–two big armchairs, which when put together can serve as a bed, and a table with all his books. They are on “most any type of subject, from literature to gardens,” he says. The walls are wood paneled and lined with bookshelves.
The armchairs, like many of the other furnishings in this house, are flea-market finds.
“I spend all my weekends in the flea market, buying and buying too much,” he says.
The flea market, L’Isle sur la Sorgue, lies about 6 miles from his getaway house, and is famous as a source for antique furniture, paintings, fabrics, silver. It is open on weekends only, but hosts two big international antiques fairs twice a year–one at Easter and one on Aug.15–which draw antiques dealers from all over Europe. This is the same flea market where Marshall Field’s scouts go to select items for Field’s annual summer Paris Flea Market.
Some of Tortu’s personal flea-market finds go directly to his shop in Paris.
“What goes to Provence has to really go well with the style of the house–17th, 18th Century rustic–and what is refined, more modern goes to Paris. In my house in Provence, I want everything simple and easy. I think sophistication comes with simplicity,” he says, as well as with colors and textures–not necessarily with expensive objects.
From Loire to there
Tortu first heard of his house seven years ago, through friends, when it came on the market. It seemed a natural for him.
Raised in France’s Loire Valley, Tortu comes from a family of market gardeners, solid peasant stock. He developed his passion for plants, and an appreciation for them in their natural state, at a very young age. After apprenticing with several florists in different regions of France, Tortu opened his original shop on Paris’ Left Bank, followed by boutiques in major cities around the world, including New York, Singapore and Taipei. (He has a big following in the Far East.) Plans are in the offing to collaborate with Field’s here on an ongoing scale.
In addition to running his boutiques, Tortu is on call around the world for major events. He designs backdrops for Armani, Dior and Chanel fashion shows as well as the Cannes Film Festival. Recently Tortu extended his passion for beauty into a line of home-decor items.
Immediately after masterminding the Field’s show, Tortu was off to Dubai, Saudi Arabia to direct the palace wedding of the king’s daughter. Then he was off to consult with a Cairo museum. During the week, Tortu lives in a Paris apartment, but as an antidote to this high-flying professional life, the Provencal villa is really his spiritual greenhouse.
The decor is very casual, something he doesn’t have to worry about when he brings his dog and cat from Paris to spend the summer with him there.
When he invites guests, he is a wonderful host. Steve Podesta, a California floral designer who has collaborated with Tortu on executing the Marshall Field’s show for the past five years, says he and his wife, Brenda, spent time with the French designer at the villa.
Podesta, who owns SF Productions in Lake Tahoe, Calif., said Tortu rose early every morning and joined the stream of grannies on their bicycles, visiting the bread baker, the fruit market and so on.
He then returned home and loaded a zinc tray of his own design, knocked on the Podestas’ door, calling softly, “Princess Brenda, here is your breakfast.”
“He just made me look so bad, I had to be a nicer person to my wife after that,” says Podesta. “His house is very beautiful. You could do all kinds of things to it, but he’s kept it simple, kept its origins, but accentuated the architecture with the things he’s done.”
Is the country house different from his life in Paris?
“Oh yes, so different from Paris, no stress,” Tortu says, making a face mimicking relief.
“I like it. I think it is really my pleasure,” he says of his most personal arrangement of colors, textures, flowers and furnishings.
Flower arranging the Tortu way
Christian Tortu’s advice on arranging flowers:
1. Remember that all flowers are created equal. The bouquet is one of nature’s forms of writing, but the language stays the same: a language of freedom and equality. One should not deprive oneself of anything. All plant life deserves to be mentioned, even the least noble, the most obscure, the most ephemeral. Leaving pomposity behind, we are left with the power of controlled chaos, rearranged to communicate the beauty of a landscape.
2. Think entirely green bouquets: What better homage can be paid to nature? Foliage need not be used only in a bouquet to accompany flowers and to enhance them, it can be a bouquet in itself.
3. Dare to put together unseemly color combinations so that we can feel the emotion of a wild garden or a winding path.
4. Indulge in monochromatic arrangements, creating bouquets not only in matching tones, but in traditionally unworthy hues: beiges, whites, grays and blacks. Nothing is excluded, not even the colors of the city.
5. Try round bouquets, which are “less demonstrative and less official but filled with nuance and a certain easygoing quality. For me, the round bouquet is a way of taking the opposite view to a ceremonial bouquet of flowers, affected and rigid to the point that we worry about removing it from the paper in which it is wrapped.”
— Mary Daniels
