© Ambroise Tézenas/Centre des monuments nationaux from *The French Royal Wardrobe*, Flammarion 2022

Above: The bedroom overlooking the courtyard, along with the “room of mirrors” and the gilded study, are reconstructions of the apartment in the days of Pierre Élisabeth de Fontanieu.

Hôtel de la Marine, situated on Paris’ grand Place de Concorde, has opened after an impressive four-year restoration project and now houses an incredible museum open to the public. The 18th-century building, designed by Louis XIV’s primary architect Ange Jacques Gabriel, served as a furniture workshop and stored all of the king’s most-prized pieces until 1789 when it became the Ministry of the Navy. Today, guests to the museum can observe the opulent reception rooms, loggia, and several rotating exhibitions. In the new book, The French Royal Wardrobe: The Hôtel de la Marine Restored, journalist Jérôme Hanover alongside curator and historian Gabriel Baure take you behind the scenes to the moments the building was being brought back to life as viewed through the lens of photographer Ambroise Tézenas. Here is an excerpt from The Weave of Time, which shares details about the elaborate textiles used in the interiors.

An Excerpt from ‘The French Royal Wardrobe’, Flammarion 2022

The Weave of Time

Textiles were long the most precious goods in the Royal Wardrobe. Richly embroidered, woven with gold thread, they were enlivened by rigorously regular patterns or painted with scenes that rivaled the ones done on canvas or panel.

The “flying shuttle,” designed to accelerate weaving, arrived in France in 1747 along with its English inventor, John Kay. Forty years later, the first steam-driven looms would trigger the industrial revolution. In 1801, an industrialist from Lyon, Joseph Marie Jacquard, invented the loom that now bears his name. Suddenly a single worker could produce brocades and complex damask patterns—like the ones lining the walls of the intendant-general’s apartment—that previously required an entire team of weavers. The second half of the eighteenth century set the stage for a technological revolution that would transform the status of fabrics in the following century. Less costly, fabrics thereby became less precious. But in the days of the Royal Wardrobe their lavish presence still indicated the host’s affluence.

Textiles are fragile. They are easily damaged and inevitably deteriorate. As with the paint on the walls, any clash with eighteenth-century interior decoration, furnishings, and objects would have created a temporal cleft, a kind of glaring hiatus that might have skewed the entire historic approach. Such a blunder would have engendered disbelief. “The scale of values couldn’t be reversed.”62 Hence there are miles and miles of fabric in the intendant-general’s apartment, covering walls, windows, alcoves, fire screens, door, beds, cushions, etc. And they are all coordinated, of course. It took years for Achkar and Charrière, the two interior decorators, to come up with enough yards of period material to upholster almost all the chairs. When it came to the walls, things were sometimes complicated. Finding an identical pattern in such quantity was a true challenge. But it was met, with a crimson damask, in the gilded study.

Above: Thierry de Ville-d’Avray’s bedroom.

Above: A dressing table in the bathroom of Thierry de Ville-d’Avray’s apartment.

ROSE & IVY The Restoration of The Hôtel de la Marine — © Ambroise Tézenas/Centre des monuments nationaux from *The French Royal Wardrobe*, Flammarion 2022

Above: The doors to the dining room after restoration.

Above: A view of the ground level arcade for pedestrians and, above, the colonnade of the Hôtel de la Marine

Above: The row of rooms in Thierry de Ville-d’Avray’s apartment. The hallways and service passages, hidden behind the main rooms, were included in the overall restoration.

Purchase the book

The Restoration of The Hôtel de la Marine

The Weave of Time