Home is where the art is: artists’ houses

From Frederic Leighton’s ‘private palace of art’ to Georgia O’Keeffe’s humble Abiquiú home — 10 artists’ dwellings that are works of art in themselves

The studio at Jardin Majorelle, Marrakech. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

Jacques Majorelle

Jardin Majorelle, Marrakech, Morocco

When Yves Saint Laurent first visited the former home of the French artist Jacques Majorelle (1886-1962) in Marrakech, it was in a state of romantic abandonment. Majorelle had travelled extensively in Morocco and become famed in France for his depictions of the country. Many of his paintings incorporated an intense cobalt blue, and the fashion designer saw lingering traces of the colour on the derelict building.

In 1970 Saint Laurent bought the house, studio and gardens and undertook an extensive programme of restoration. Beneath the tangled vegetation were ponds, pathways and drought-tolerant plants, which were brought back to life by the landscape designer Madison Cox.

Villa Oasis at Jardin Majorelle, the residence of Jacques Majorelle and then Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Photo: Kate Hockenhull/4Corners

Jardin Majorelle, Marrakech. Photo: Kerry Dunstone / Alamy Stock Photo

The studio had been designed by the architect Paul Sinoir in 1931 as a Cubist villa with a Moroccan twist — a place that Majorelle hoped would provide him with peaceful surroundings for his work.

It was originally white, but Majorelle drastically changed its appearance in 1937, painting the walls, doors and pond edges in yellow ochre and his trademark bleu Majorelle. The effect was mesmerising — and an ideal complement to his beloved garden.

Frederic Edwin Church

Olana, Hudson, New York

In 1859 the celebrated artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) bought a hardscrabble farm in the Hudson Valley, near where he had spent his apprenticeship with Thomas Cole, and transformed it into a landscape as dramatic as his paintings.

Having secured his reputation and wealth on the depiction of the sublime majesty of the Americas, Church surprised his contemporaries by taking inspiration from the Middle East for his new home.

Court Hall, Main House, Olana. Photo: Peter Aaron/OTTO

He instructed his architect, Calvert Vaux, to reference the palaces and mosques of Persia, and the result was an extraordinary, jewel-like red-brick edifice with minarets and a bell tower.

Church named his home Olana, after a mythical Persian treasure house, decorating the interior with Moorish designs and building arched windows that framed dramatic views of the Catskill Mountains. It was, wrote one visitor, ‘the ideal home for a landscape painter’.

Gustave Moreau

Maison Gustave Moreau, Paris, France

When Marcel Proust visited Gustave Moreau’s house in 1907, he was struck by the shrine-like nature of the building.

‘Now that he is dead,’ wrote the novelist, ‘Gustave Moreau’s house is to become a museum. Which is as it should be… His house was half church, half priest’s house.’

A spiral staircase designed by the architect Albert Lafon on the second floor of Gustave Moreau’s residence. Photo: Hemis / Alamy Stock Photo

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) had such an acute sense of his own mortality that he began thinking about his legacy while in his thirties. In December 1862 he wrote, ‘I think of my death and the fate of my poor little works and all these compositions that I have taken the trouble to put together.’

He would later instruct the architect Albert Lafon to transform the family home at 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld into a repository for his art, with a gallery and a reception room on the first floor, and the second and third storeys transformed into a vast studio connected by a spiral staircase.

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), Le lion amoureux (the Lion in Love), circa 1881. Watercolour and gouache on paper. 15 x 9½ in (38 x 24.3 cm). Sold for £325,000 on 15 July 2021 at Christie’s in London

Here Moreau conjured up his darkly glittering images charged with a mysterious symbolism. He remained in this strange sepulchre until his death in 1898, after which the building, along with his paintings, became a museum to his enigmatic personality.

Cy Twombly

Via di Monserrato, Rome, Italy

In 1959 the painter Cy Twombly (1928-2011) bought a high-ceilinged apartment in a 17th-century palazzo on the via di Monserrato in Rome. The walls were stripped and whitewashed to create airy, sunlit rooms that could accommodate the artist’s vast abstract paintings.

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