Dining Room from the Hôtel Guimard
Hector Guimard (1867 to 1942) · 1909 to 1912
Step into a complete Art Nouveau dining room. A tall sideboard with curving shelves and a mirror, a dining table and chairs, wall panelling and a fireplace are all made from the same pale pear wood, and every edge flows into the next like the stem of a plant. The lines never quite settle: a shelf swells into a bracket, a chair back becomes a stalk, a hinge turns into a bud. Hector Guimard designed the room for his own house on the Avenue Mozart in the sixteenth arrondissement, which he built in 1909 after marrying the American painter Adeline Oppenheim.
Guimard is best known for the cast iron entrances to the Paris Métro, whose green stalks and orange lamps became the emblem of Art Nouveau in the city. This room shows the same vocabulary applied to domestic life. Look closely at the carved wood and the bronze fittings, and notice how the decoration is not applied to the furniture but grows out of its structure, which was Guimard's central idea. The house itself was famously narrow and irregular, and the dining room had to fit a curving wall, so the sideboard is designed to hug the corner.
Guimard and his wife left France for New York in 1938, and after he died there in 1942 Adeline tried to give the house to the state as a museum. France refused, and she instead dispersed its contents to museums, giving the dining room to the City of Paris in 1948. The house on the Avenue Mozart still stands, but its interiors are scattered between the Petit Palais, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and museums abroad. Look for the small painted panels in the room and for Guimard's signature style of lettering on the objects nearby.
Did You Know? After Guimard's death his widow offered the whole house to the French state as a museum; it was refused, so she gave the dining room to Paris instead.
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