The newly revamped Musée des Arts Décoratifs is
once again a mecca for design mavens and professionals alike.

Paris is widely believed to have more museums than any other city. Along with the Louvre, Orsay, Pompidou and other big league players, there are dozens of charming and arcane collections, from the Musée Bricard, devoted to locks and keys, to the Musée des Arts Forains, showcasing fairground carousels. A recent spate of openings and re-openings has added to this embarrassment of riches: This fall, visitors are discovering the new Musée du Quai Branly and rediscovering the renovated Musée de l’Orangerie and Petit Palais.
    One of the most anticipated re-openings took place on September 15, with the inauguration of the totally revamped Musée des Arts Décoratifs. When it first welcomed the public in 1905, it was—as befits a country where style so often competes with substance—the world’s leading decorative arts museum. A 10-year, $46 million restoration of both the historic building and the displayed objects has only confirmed that position. In fact, the place has undergone such a complete overhaul that management’s claim that it is virtually a new museum is not unjustified.
    The 5,911 objects on view are only the tip of a rather large iceberg. Over the years, the museum has accumulated a prodigious collection of 150,000 items, beginning with furniture and decorative objects acquired from the landmark Paris Exposition of 1900, when Art Nouveau was cutting edge and Art Deco the shape of the future.
    Today the collection boasts furniture, textiles, wallpaper, murals, paintings, porcelain, toys and jewelry from the Middle Ages to the present. While the museum’s intention is to showcase French craftsmanship and creativity, its primary goal, says museum director Béatrice Salmon, is to evoke the way people lived through the objects they surrounded themselves with. “What we want to show is French taste, not French style,” she says. “Decorative taste reflects society.”
    The expanded museum occupies the northwestern wing of the Palais du Louvre, with the rue de Rivoli on one side and the Tuileries gardens on the other. In the glass-roofed interior, loggias formerly walled in with concrete have been re-opened, letting in natural light and revealing handsome architectural details. At the far end, one of the Louvre’s famous domes, rising nine stories above Paris, now offers five floors of additional exhibition space, each with spectacular 360-degree views of the city.
    Temporary exhibitions and displays of toys and jewelry occupy the first and second floors; the rest are turned over to the permanent collection. Objects are presented in chronological order, beginning with the Middle Ages on the third floor and winding up with objects from the 1940s to the present on the ninth, just under the cupola. The task of designing these spaces was entrusted to three different teams of architects, each of whom was responsible for a specific section.

The biggest draw, however, will surely be the 10 “period rooms” (the museum uses the English phrase) that punctuate the collection. Originally part of private homes or public buildings throughout France, all have been restored and reassembled at the museum under the watchful eye of François-Joseph Graf, one of Europe’s leading interior designers. Seven of them previously belonged to the museum and three are recent donations.
    One of the new acquisitions is the Cabinet doré d’Avignon, a small jewel of a room from the Hôtel de Rochegude in Provence. Its elegant porcelain and glittering display of gold and silver seem unusually opulent for a provincial room—until Bertrand Rondot, the museum’s curator of 18th-century objects, explains that the décor was created around 1720 by Thomas Laine, the king’s architect. The unfortunate Laine had apparently fallen out of royal favor and been banished from the court to the Provençal boondocks.
    Another fine Louis XVI room was originally part of the Hôtel de Serres on Paris’s posh Place Vendôme. Its intricate wood paneling is decorated with scenes from La Fontaine’s fables and has been meticulously restored to reveal different phases of its existence. Two walls are painted rose and pale green, as they were in 1790, when the house was built; the other two are a more masculine gray with gilding dating from a later era, when the military governor of Paris lived in the house. This is but one example of the way the museum shows how one decorative period gradually replaced another—after all, when Louis XVI succeeded Louis XV, the French did not immediately throw out all their old furniture.
    Representing the 20th century is the Art Nouveau pavilion from the 1900 Exposition Universelle, complete with the original paneling and furniture. New wallpaper and wall hangings have been made by hand, replicating the frayed and faded originals. Equally stunning are the Art Deco bedroom, boudoir and bathroom (complete with bathtub) that Armand-Albert Rateau dreamed up for couturier Jeanne Lanvin. This 1920s ensemble—another new acquisition—is at once fresh and chic, with periwinkle-blue fabric embroidered in white.

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