Emilio Terry

Emilio Rene Terry y Sánchez (1890–1969), known as Emilio Terry was a French architect, artist, interior decorator and landscape designer of Cuban-Irish ancestry. Creating furniture, tapestries and objets d'art, he was influenced by the château de Chenonceau, acquired by his family, and he created a style that was at once classical and baroque, which he called the "Louis XVII style".

Terry was born in Paris on September 13, 1890 to Francisco Terry y Dorticós, scion of a prominent Cuban family, Hispano-Irish in origin, that made its fortune in the sugar plantations. His mother, a great beauty, was the former Antonia Sánchez. His paternal grandfather was sugar baron Tomás Terry, a Venezuelan-born Irishman known as the "Cuban Croesus", and his paternal grandmother was Teresa Dorticós y Gómez de Leys, a daughter of Andrés Dorticós y Casson, the millionaire Governor of Cienfuegos, Cuba. One of his uncles, Antonio Terry, married the American soprano Sybil Sanderson.

After 1897 Francisco Terry moved his family to New York City, where Antonia and her daughter, Natividad (later Countess Stanislas de Castellane), were painted in 1897 by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury. The family later moved to France, where Francisco Terry's brother José-Emilio—his son's namesake—had purchased Château de Chenonceaux in 1891. The château was sold in 1896 to Francisco Terry.

Emilio Terry owned a villa on the Côte d'Azur and a Paris apartment at 2, place du Palais-Bourbon. He bought the Paris residence from Boni de Castellane in 1914. Boni records in his Mémoires : "I didn't have much money. […] M. Terry, brother of my sister in law Stanislas […], fell in love with my apartment, and […] and asked me to give over the lease to him. […] I sold my furniture to this noble Cuban. »

On 24 June 1934, Terry bought from his brother-in-law Stanislas de Castellane the historic château de Rochecotte, near Langeais (Indre-et-Loire), famous for having belonged to Dorothée de Courlande, duchesse of Dino and received Talleyrand on frequent visits. For 35 years, Emilio Terry restored this château and decorated it in the right period style. He bequeathed Rochecotte to his great-nephew Count Henri de Castellane, but the family sold the estate in the early 1980s. It is now a country house hotel.

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