Pristine white walls provide the perfect backdrop for the architectural details that feature in this Bordeaux apartment, along with owner and artist Carmen Almon’s works. Celia Rufey reports
It says much about priorities in late 18th-century France that the buildings along the quay overlooking the River Garonne in Bordeaux were constructed as facades with nothing but empty space behind them. Their purpose was to provide an image of suitable grandeur to impress Louis XVI as he floated by on the river. We can only wonder if he happened to look that way. A variety of structures were then built up in a piecemeal fashion behind these elegant frontages.
“Our apartment was built after the Revolution and is © LIVING4MEDIA listed as being early 19th century,” says the American artist Carmen Almon, who lives here with her husband, sculptor Thierry Job, and her 19-year-old daughter, Zoe. Carmen is still astonished by the arbitrary nature of what now lies behind these elevations. “You can see huge rooms, windows that are cut in two by partitions. It’s quite bizarre, like a labyrinth.”
ROOMS WITH A VIEW
They purchased the apartment in 2007, captivated by the view of the river, the high ceilings and the oval dining room lined with cabinets fitted behind paneling. The interior otherwise presented a strange dichotomy of styles, with grand rooms at the front decorated and furnished in traditional fashion, and a jumble of small rooms with low ceilings at the back. “It was quite schizophrenic,” Carmen observes. “The original kitchen had boarded walls and a porthole, and the hall walls were clad in corrugated metal.”
The living room with its early-19th-century paneling, mouldings, carved marble fireplace and pair of mirrors that are mounted into the walls opposite one another in such a way that they instigate an image of infinity is, in Carmen’s words, “so highly charged with architectural details that for us its decoration had to be minimal. We couldn’t have tolerated any colour in here – we would have run out screaming. It had to be white”.
In fact, white is the default wall colour in all the rooms. “We like white walls,” she says, “because it’s a non-colour and objects disappear against it. A clean bright space is essential because when we work, we need to limit any distractions.”
Carmen works in the kitchen and the dining room, creating botanical tole – branches of blossom and climbing plants executed in copper sheet, brass tubes and steel wire, under intricate layers of paint. Like all artists of extraordinary talent who have discovered a novel means of capturing the essential qualities o
