A Glimpse Inside John Galliano’s Treasure-Filled Hideaway in Northern France

The fruits of Galliano’s sleuthing with Roche are abundantly evident. His suave juxtapositions in the Salon Jaune, for instance—including splay-legged 1950s Gio Ponti armchairs upholstered in a chintz design of plump pomegranates and peonies, a rosy needlepoint rug, a 1940s marmalade red velvet sofa, a Louis XV chair in sunflower silk velvet, and an 18th-century painted Italian commode—bring the room seductively into the 21st century and illustrate the couple’s passions.

Galliano thinks nothing of hanging a Sex Pistols poster or Ron Raffaelli’s portrait of Jimi Hendrix to jostle 19th-century salon art, Brassaï and Penn photographs, and homoerotic Jean Cocteau drawings. Madame Bijou, Brassaï’s 1932 portrait of a disheveled woman sitting at a table in a bar, an original print of which now hangs in Galliano’s guest bathroom, “has inspired many a collection,” the designer confides. “The volume of the coat, the hat, the wig, the jewels, the fallen stockings, the tap-dancing shoes—I mean, it’s just an endless dialogue with Madame Bijou!”

The house is also a palimpsest of the places Galliano and Roche have traveled, particularly on the epic inspiration trips that Galliano once took with his teams for his eponymous brand and for Christian Dior, the house that he redefined as artistic director from 1996 to 2011. These travels took them to Japan, China, and India, among other exciting locales. One end of the Salon Jaune, for instance, is hung with a collection of exquisite 17th- and 18th-century Indian miniatures found in Rajasthan on that India reconnaissance mission. “There’s always been a magical relationship with India,” Galliano says.

Outside, Galliano worked with Camille Muller to create a romantic, English-inspired garden, although it is an ancient beech tree that perhaps excites his imagination the most. (In the last quarter of the 18th century, a complaint was brought against the house’s dissolute owner, and Galliano is convinced that the scars in the stately plane tree’s trunk are a flagellant’s stigmata.)

Soon after they arrived, Galliano and Roche befriended the village’s colorful cast of neighbors, who now provide gardening and psychic advice, gossip, and delicious produce and local culinary delicacies. Dressed like a Bloomsbury Group eccentric on an afternoon that I visited—in a Margiela prototype sweater knitted from strips of blue and lilac gingham, a Margiela trench, Wellington boots, and a woven-straw cloche hat pulled down low on his brow—Galliano set off with Roche to pay his calls with the couple’s Brussels Griffons, Gypsy and Coco, gamboling at their feet.

He seemed very much at home.