Life Update

One door closes and another opens as Robert Couturier settles into a Manhattan home packed with old-world charms

- DAVID FOXLEY

I'm an American, I'm a New Yorker," says Robert Couturier, surrounded by his four shih tzus on a plush sofa at his Upper East Side apartment. "But if somebody asks me what I am, I would say I'm French. There are some things that stick to you like glue." Which is why, after his relationship of almost a quarter century recently ended, the Paris-born designer allowed his native country to inspire his next chapter.

That spiritual homecoming is perfectly manifested in his new Manhattan home-his 11th to date-which he filled to the brim with 18th-century French pieces, a style that characterized his childhood. "These are the smells I love, the books I love, the objects I love," he says, gesturing to treasures here and there, among them an incense burner that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, a sculpture of Madame du Barry's dog, and a painting by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun of a woman in mourning after the death of Louis XVI. "This is the first time in a long, long time that I'm doing a house exclusively for me, and I don't have to please anybody else but myself."