Villa Majorelle

The Villa Majorelle is a house located at 1 rue Louis-Majorielle in the city of Nancy, France, which was the home and studio of the furniture designer Louis Majorelle. It was designed and built by the architect Henri Sauvage in 1901-1902. The villa is one of the first and most influential examples of the Art Nouveau architectural style in France. It served as a showcase for Majorelle's furniture and the work of other noted decorative artists of the period, including ceramist Alexandre Bigot and stained glass artist Jacques Gruber. It is now owned by the city of Nancy, and is open to the public certain days for tours by reservation.

The house was commissioned by Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), a Nancy furniture designer and manufacturer. His father, Auguste Majorelle, a craftsman who made fine lacquered furniture, had begun the family firm in Nancy in 1860, making and selling finely-crafted lacquered furniture, and had been awarded prizes and achieved an international reputation for his work at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878. His son Louis also planned an artistic career, and entered the course of painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1877, when he was only eighteen. His father died two years later, and Louis took over the family firm.

At the time that Louis took over the firm, Nancy was growing rapidly, due largely to the arrival of thousands of French residents of Alsace and parts of Lorraine who left their homes after they became part of Germany following the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The city grew from 50,00 inhabitants in 1872 to 120,000 in 1911. Many of the new arrivals were prosperous, and they wanted fine furniture for their new homes. Louis Majorelle decided to expand the workshops of the firm, then located in the southern part of Nancy. In 1897 bought a parcel of 3500 square meters in what was then a rural area west of the city, and built a new factory there. He then planned the construction of his new residence close to the factory, a common practice in that period.

To design his house, Louis chose a young architect recommended by his friends from the Ecole des Beaux Arts; Henri Sauvage, who was only twenty-four. The Villa was his first project. Sauvage was assisted by Lucien Weissenburger (1860-1829), who had designed the nearby factory. Weissenburger went on to design many prominent art nouveau buildings in Nancy, in what became known as the school of Nancy. Majorelle also maintained close relations with artists he had known at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, including the sculptor Alexandre Charpentier (1856-1909) and the painter Francis Jourdain (1876-1958), who collaborated with him on furniture and participated in the decoration of the villa.

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