Double Feature

In France’s Basque Country, Renaissance man and passionate collector Christian Astuguevieille discovers that when it comes to housing his latest acquisitions, two artfully arranged apartments are better than one

- Ian Phillips

Designer Christian Astuguevieille is constantly in need of space. “Like many people who create things, I have the problem of where to store them,” he says. The solution he has found is to have not one, but two apartments, two doors apart, in the city of Bayonne in southwestern France. In both spaces, paintings are propped against walls, shelves are massed with an accumulation of objects, and entire rooms have been set aside to house his archives. Even a bathroom wall is lined with bookshelves.

Astuguevieille is a man of many talents. He is creative director of Comme des Garçons Parfums (his latest scent, Concrete, recently launched in the U.S.). He paints, sculpts, and designs everything from jewelry to furniture; fans of the latter include architect Peter Marino and interior designer Nate Berkus. Astuguevieille’s signature material is rope, which he tightly winds around light fixtures, tables, and chests, among other pieces. “It’s wonderfully tactile,” he says. His most recent venture is a collection of earthy, unglazed pottery created with his assistant Frédéric Poircuitte, which will be unveiled at Astuguevieille’s Paris gallery this September. Many of the totemlike forms owe a certain something to one of his most important aesthetic influences—the tribal art of Oceania.