No, not a book about a large cupboard: the Hôtel de la Marine, on place de la Concorde in Paris – mirror image of the famous Crillon hotel – is a storage facility on an altogether different scale. This was the royal family’s garde-meuble, or furniture store, and the whole building has been dazzlingly restored as only the French know how. This eye-poppingly gorgeous volume tells the whole tale, from the building’s design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in the 18th century to the 21st-century renovation of its every last feature, right down to the doorknobs.
The French Royal Wardrobe (Jérôme Hanover & Gabriel Bauret, Flammarion, 2021, ISBN 9782080261328, 288pp, £65)
NOTES
This book review was published in the March 2022 issue of France magazine.
For more information about the Hôtel de la Marine, click here; for more on Paris, click here; for more about this and other titles from Flammarion, click here. To read more of my book reviews and other published work, click here.
The photo at the top of this post is © Jean-Pierre Delagarde – Centre des Monuments Nationaux.