After a rewarding season giving lectures and workshops in Palm Beach County, I enjoyed a short, three day jaunt to Paris with the French Heritage Society.
One of the highlights was the cocktail reception in the Marais at the hotel particulaire of Juan Pablo Molyneaux and his wife, Pilar. His classically-rigorous, decidedly decadent and elegantly eccentric designs are really only available to corporate kingpins, potentates with limitless funds who can afford a much lauded interior designer of international renown.
The entry has 30′ ceilings with blue and white wallpaper depicting famous royal residences on three of the walls. One wall has 2′ high porcelain statues of whimsical animals on pliniths.
Black and white tiles on the diagonal are a strong design feature in many rooms.
Giant Egyptian statues flank the entry to the first room in the house which is his study. You can see at the end of that room another Egyptian statue precisely centered between the two at the main entry door. Such precision and placement!
His study has black and white tiles on the diagonal in a semicircular design that gets visually smaller.
His three drawings rooms are positioned enfilade, one leading to the next along connecting corridors. They can easily entertain one hundred in these three rooms.
His has an intimate red, Chinoiserie dining room for twelve.
Then we went along the hallway to the next room, three times in size, that had real feathers from partridge, pheasant and grouse separated in alternating bands against a padded damask silk wall covering in fall colors. Three years ago Juan Pablo and Pilar invited our French Heritage group of 16 to a blow-out six course dinner in this room which was done in a “smiling” monkey theme then.
The other highlight of our time in Paris was a hard hat tour at the level of the scaffolding on Notre Dame’s cathedral conducted by two master carpenters and the Director General of the project.
Our visit was timed to coincide with the exact moment the cross was being raised into place on top of the cathedral.
What better place to enjoy oysters than Paris! I love raw oysters and my wife Chris likes them cooked, Rockefeller style in butter, cream, shallots and spinach. So we seek out places to enjoy them all over the world. The most I have downed is eighteen but Diamond Jim Brady, and our friend, Roger Yaseen now of Palm Beach, (who created the Diamond Jim Brady Society in NYC) , can manage to consume five dozen! And Thomas Jefferson is on record routinely enjoying six dozen!
