"I felt those furnishings, copied from villas in Herculaneum and Egypt, among other places, were just too small in scale," she explains. They had, says Huniford, also encouraged Turner to treat her interiors with the same Neoclassical spareness that Reinach and his Italian architect had achieved in Beaulieu, though she demurred. And the architecture of her own villa pays homage to the classical style in its terraced amphitheater its stenciled plasterwork the graceful disposition of Greek and Roman pottery and sculpture the columned pool loggia and terraces-sheltered from the mistral and the sun by canvas shades bordered with a Greek-key motif-and chandeliers of bronze and alabaster adapted from the Villa Kérylos by Sills and Huniford. "It was an inspiration to me," says Turner. But she was the mastermind of this house: It's her own invention."Įarly on in what Huniford calls their "visual journey together," the designers took Turner to visit the fin de siècle Villa Kérylos in nearby Beaulieu, built by the erudite French Hellenist Théodore Reinach, modeled after the houses of ancient Delos and decorated with meticulously faithful reproductions of Attic furnishings, art, mosaics, frescoes and fixtures. We toured museums together, went shopping on the quai Voltaire in Paris, exchanged books and ideas-which Tina accepted or rejected, as it suited her-and we helped to edit her collections. In working with Tina, who's a natural-born decorator, it was really a matter of helping her to find her own voice-to express her own style-rather than to impose ours. "Your sensibility functions like a prism. Their penchant is for classicism, though they stress the fact that "every commission is different, because our job is to interpret how a client wants to live." "Designing involves culture, intuition, artisanship and an ideal of transparency, which I can best compare to the art of literary translation," Sills says.
"The boys," as she calls them fondly, have in the past decade become the young old masters of interior design, famous for patrician interiors that integrate antiques of exalted provenance and furnishings from the great modernist and Art Déco designers with a rigorous sense of history. I'll say to them: Yes, let's do it no thanks, I've been there'-we work from feelings. From their first meeting she "felt instinctively" she could work with them, and they, says Huniford, "having always loved her music, immediately adored her."
#Tina turner now professional
Eventually I saw that I needed professional help-the right kind for me."Īfter a vacation in Aspen, Colorado, where she stayed in the splendid neo-Baroque manor of her friends Jim and Betsy Fifield (see Architectural Digest, March 1999), Turner contacted their designers, Stephen Sills and James Huniford. But getting things perfect in a house this scale was taking me too long. And that's what I've always done on tour-rearrange the hotel furniture, sheet the ugly paintings. Even though it was freezing in winter and broiling in summer-and no bigger than a closet-I made it a place of my own. I brought a bedspread from home and a few treasures.
I was a little girl when my parents separated, and I moved in with relatives, claiming a back room in their house. I've always wanted and needed to transform my surroundings, because decorating is my first response to loss and upheaval settle, collect-create a private universe. "When I see something I love-a suite of furniture, a piece of art-I never measure, I never hesitate, I just buy it.
"A great interior has to coalesce," she says. Turner's villa, like Turner herself, has, she says, gone through a number of "incarnations" before acquiring its present character, in which grandeur is balanced by informality. Up here the wind and clouds breeze through the house, and the sky makes mesmerizing pictures. My mother's Indian side has given me a different kind of religious heritage. I was raised in the country, come from a Bible-reading family and grew up on church music.
#Tina turner now full
But in fact it's a very spiritual place-between two mountains, surrounded by woods that are full of wildlife-and that's essential to me. When we heard that this property was for sale, we were told that angels live here,' and we laughed about it.
"The Cap is Beverly Hills," she declares, "and that's what I fled. But the glittering and rather decadent social life of the coastal resorts never appealed to her. While she and Bach were living in Germany, Turner's manager introduced her to the south of France, and she subsequently rented a "little pink house" near the summit she now inhabits.