Joy de Rohan-Chabot accents her family’s Auvergne residence with fanciful furnishings and whimsical murals—without diminishing any of its historic character .
ay the word château and most people imagine a majestic rural manor embellished with turrets and boiserie. Château de Jozerand in the Auvergne region of central France is certainly that, but it also harbors delightful surprises. A giant bronze butterfly flutters on a table in the petit salon, and tree-shaped tables sprout here and there—playful objects made by the lady of the house, artist Joy de Rohan-Chabot. “I get my ideas in the country,” she says. “When I don’t have inspiration, I go for walks, and then it comes easily.”
A 15th-century fortified castle, Jozerand was renovated in the 1830s by architect Félix Duban, best known for designing the main building of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His interiors for the L-shaped château remain remarkably unaltered, right down to the wallpaper in the two dozen or so bedrooms. “My idea was to make it easier to live in but not to change the atmosphere,” Joy explains of her preservation work at the 23-acre estate, which has been home to her husband Jean’s noble family for more than 200 years. The couple spend half their time there, retreating to a Paris townhouse for most of the winter.To date, Joy’s most gratifying project at Jozerand has been completing the grand salon, which serves as the main living room. “When that room was originally being installed, the work stopped because of the revolution of 1848,” she explains, adding that the two world wars halted later attempts, leaving expanses of raw wood and an air of neglect. “It became the bad-luck room,” she continues. “When we took over, Jean’s family said, ‘Don’t finish it!’ But we did, and there hasn’t been a war yet.”
The artist painted the walls above the salon’s oak wainscot with a parade of large faience vases from the Rohan-Chabot collection; the pottery depicted stands in the adjacent loggia. For the beamed ceiling, Jean brought home a 1930s Venetian chandelier, which Joy, the resident handyman, installed. “I’m a plumber, carpenter, mason, and electrician,” she says proudly. That unexpected combination of elbow grease and elegance has been an attribute since her youth, when an average day could mean creating murals for the nightclub Regine’s, then being snapped for Vogue by Henry Clarke, David Bailey, or Helmut Newton.
An alumna of the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris—“because I’m dyslexic, I always was much better at painting and drawing”— Joy works in many media, including cast bronze. (An exhibition of the artist’s latest series of bronzes goes on view at Galerie Matignon in Paris on November 24.) About ten years ago she started painting glass tumblers, goblets, and dishes, which Doris Brynner, manager of Christian Dior’s Art de la Maison department, stocked at the Avenue Montaigne flagship. There they caught the eye of Dior owner Bernard Arnault’s daughter Delphine, who commissioned 700 plates for her wedding dinner. Joy finished them in just two months. “The last 20 were agonizing,” she says. “I kept saying, ‘Only 20 to go, only 19 to go, only 18 to go...’”
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