Inside Louis Vuitton's Family Home and Atelier, Just Outside Paris

16.07.2024 - 23:15 / cntraveler.com / Louis Vuitton

To travel from the center of Paris to Asnières-sur-Seine, about six miles northwest, is to witness a cross section of the city's evolution: Neoclassical monuments give way to the industrial suburb of Clichy, where corporate giants are headquartered and sustainable urbanism is taking hold. From there the Seine cuts through the city sprawl as it snakes its way north, and several traffic-strewn bridges take you over the Left Bank to reach the small commune, a hub of creation that has hummed away just outside the city's periphery for the past 150 years.

A Louis Vuitton trunk being brought to life inside the Asnières-sur-Seine atelier space

The living room of the Vuitton family home

In the mid to late 19th century, Asnières-sur-Seine's streets, lined with elegant brick villas, became a charming refuge from city life for the burgeoning middle class. This was the appeal for a trunk maker named Louis Vuitton, who built a workshop here in 1859. From this base, Vuitton, who became the official packer and box maker for Empress Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III, established his leather-goods empire—helped by the advent of train travel and his ingenious courier trunks.

Thierry de Longevialle, director of the museum and family home, now hosts the fashion house's top clients here, a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can be arranged via insiders like Stéphanie Boutet-Fajol, of the boutique travel operator Sacrebleu Paris. Guests can spend half a day exploring the property with a guide and private driver, with a stop for lunch nearby.

On the June day when I visit, the gardens are filled with the scent of roses and jasmine. Obscured from the quiet residential street by high fences, the estate feels Edenic. De Longevialle begins our tour in the home's spacious double salon, part of a 1900 Art Nouveau extension commissioned by Louis Vuitton's only child, Georges Ferréol Vuitton, and designed by Hector Guimard, a leading architect of the decorative arts movement. Georges was considered more flamboyant than his father, as evidenced by the room, which embodies Art Nouveau's valorization of fine craftsmanship and the natural world; sensual frescoes creep up the walls, and a spring garden blooms across the original stained glass windows. At one end is a fantastically ornate bright blue ceramic fireplace by Ècole de Nancy.

Georges is also responsible for creating the LV initial in 1896, a symbol that arguably came to represent the birth of modern luxury. It remains the uniform motif on the exteriors of some 4,000 trunks crafted in the workshop just across the courtyard. Though modern in its design, the light-filled two-story atelier is home to methods, materials, and tools that are little changed since Louis Vuitton's