Modern Master

- Hamish Bowles.

In 1975, Vogue called François Catroux “the crack interior designer of Paris . . . who moves space and volume, texture and light, objects and planes with the sense of an architect, the eye of an artist.” Through the years, the magazine has documented Catroux’s elegantly urbane work for taste makers from Marie

Hélène de Rothschild to Lauren Santo Domingo, but in 1970 Horst photographed Catroux in his own house, with his rangily elegant wife, Betty (muse and intimate of Yves Saint Laurent), lolling against the polished-steel chimney breast. Vogue dubbed the exhilarating space an “Op-art-ment . . . a 1970 space capsule within a historic building” that was filled with African sculpture and the designer’s “favored surfaces of stainless steel, lacquer, slicked plastics, and matte fabrics.”