The house’s biggest work of art is James Turrell’s underground light installation. Stepping inside an 1870s hôtel particulier in Paris, where tall windows overlook the river Seine and the Musée du Louvre, is to be transported back in time, to the Third Republic that followed the fall of Napoléon III, back when courtesans set the fashion and balls were the rule rather than the exception. Walls, ceilings, beams, doors, and floors pullulate with patterns and motifs: painted, gilded, dripping with trompe l’oeil pearls, swirling vegetation, swags of faux fabric, and great lashings of wedding-cake plasterwork. Mythological narratives are recounted in polychromatic terms, with Hercules attending to his labors across one ceiling as lissome Muses, from Erato to Urania, strike attitudes on walls.
“He wanted a palace, not a house,” AD100…