Grand Entrance
With Venetian colors, Asian artifacts, and classic French craftsmanship, Rose Anne de Pampelonne brings her family's Beaux Arts mansion in Paris back to life
In the Paris living room of fashion and interior designer Rose Anne de Pampelonne, a 1940 Emilio Terry–designed bed from Florence Lopez stands beside a 17th-century Filipino altar table displaying Tang dynasty statuettes.
In the beginning, there was a bed, a sumptuous 1940s relic with leafy silvered legs and a neo-Baroque headboard. But Rose Anne de Pampelonne didn't intend to use it for sleeping. Instead she placed it in a corner of her new living room in Paris, swathed it with silk velvet and brocade, and piled it with comfortable cushions—much to the puzzlement of associates of her bank-president husband, Bruno. They still can't quite fathom why anyone would install a bed in a public space. For Pampelonne, a fashion and interior designer, though, its presence evokes romantic images of Greta Garbo lounging about in the 1936 movie Camille—and also provides anyone perching there a firm sense of place. "You look up at the ceiling with all those moldings," she asserts, "and you say to yourself, 'This is France!'"
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