Narry a whisper

Madame Schlumberger photographed by Eric Boman

Bob Colacello's The Wow of São has seemingly sparked little or no interest in cyberspace. Not one of the ravinshing details created by decorator Gabhan O'Keeffe has been swooned over or glommed onto. Surely the readers of the two or three remaining interiors magazines are the same audience as that of Vanity Fair? Perhaps Madame Schlumberger's rooms were simply too grand, too foreign, and too quixotic...

....nothing shocked Paris—a city where taste is everything—more than her over-the-top new apartment, on Avenue Charles Floquet in the Seventh Arrondissement. Conceived as a neo-Baroque fantasyland by the London decorator Gabhan O’Keeffe, it set São’s contemporary art and 18th-century furniture in a series of rooms that combined France with Portugal, Scotland with Persia, and Egypt with Hollywood. The pièce de résistance was the Andalusian-style terrace, with the Eiffel Tower rising directly above it. Dinner-party debates over whether O’Keeffe’s creation was “innovative” or “abominable” got so out of hand that at one soirée a pair of socialites had to be pulled apart before they came to blows. “It’s simply hideous,” said one visitor, “but totally fabulous!”

 She had more than taste. She had audacity. - Pierre Bergé

Eric Boman for Vanity Fair, October 2010

 The grand salon  photographed by Jean-Louis Garnell for Nest

Mme Schlumberger was living proof that there is more to being a Medici than simply money and influence.





Now playing:  Frank Sinatra - The Lady is a Tramp