Kuuipo
Well-known member
When François Nars, the star makeup artist turned cosmetics king, sought a serious retreat from his lightning-paced working life, it was perhaps inevitable that fantasy would be the keynote of his quest. For Nars, make-believe is a way of life.
His first adventures in maquillage involved metamorphosing his glamorous sloe-eyed mother, Claudette, into the embodiment of the Valkyries he admired stalking through the heady Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton photographs that French Vogue published in the seventies. Later, as the maestro visagiste of eighties fashion, he transformed Naomi, Linda, Christy, et al into runway deities to fulfill the visions of designers as disparate as Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, and Valentino, and into studio goddesses for photographers such as Meisel, Newton, Avedon, and Penn. He created another career for himself when he established his cosmetics line in 1994. And, after finding that he couldn't afford these high-powered photographers to create images for his own campaigns, he decided to take the pictures himself.
For Nars, photography was "basically the same gesture as doing makeup: making somebody look beautiful, which is definitely a gesture of love in a way." It also opened up a whole new world of glamorous transformation that reflects his enduring engagement with the limelight-and-spangles world of the silver screen. "I'm a very nostalgic person; I love the past," he says. "People say, 'You have to live with the present and the future.' I don't really care. Honestly, I'd rather watch Seven Sinners with Marlene Dietrich than Catwoman with Halle Berry. We've come to a time when unfortunately everything has to be 'real,'" he sniffs disapprovingly. "But we love the fantasy!"
It was watching movies like that forties Dietrich classic that turned the infant Nars on to Hollywood's image of the South Seas, a world of pirates and illicit romance. "Tahiti was such a faraway, magic place," he remembers. "I guess it was always a dream to go there." But during three decades of a career that saw him crisscrossing the world in pursuit of perfect island locations from the Seychelles to the Caribbean, he never followed his childhood yen to explore Polynesia. That had to wait for the millennium, when he took a family vacation, island-hopping to places whose very names—Huahine, Mo'orea, Bora Bora—suggest exotic adventure.
"As soon as I arrived in Bora Bora I felt something profound," Nars says. "I was just mesmerized by the colors and the structure of the island. It struck me very, very strongly." So much so that he made inquiries about the availability of land on the main island—or even a motu, one of the infinity of little coral islands that form the Tahitian archipelago, scattered across the Pacific to an area almost the size of Europe.
Such a paradise was indeed available. Motu Tane ("Island of Universal Love" or "Island of Man") was once home to the late French explorer and anthropologist Paul Émile Victor. Celebrated for his work in the North Pole, Victor had retired to the warm embrace of this enchanting coral hideaway in the shadow of Bora Bora's mighty volcano, Mount Otemanu. A helicopter view of the motu reveals a miraculous Matisse cutout of concentric elliptic circles: the island's lush green lapped with platinum-blond sand, set in waters of further rings of aquamarine, jade, and the lustrous sapphire that defines the depths of the Pacific beyond the reefs. Nars was bewitched. "I thought that buying an island was very glamorous," he says, still dazzled by his naïveté, "without thinking at all about what it would take to make it look the way it looks now. Now it's definitely a fantasy island, totally comfortable and self-sufficient. But to get to that point was very complicated!"
To realize his dream, Nars enlisted the help of the distinguished interior designer Christian Liaigre, whose work he had admired at Manhattan's Mercer hotel and chez tastemakers such as Calvin and Karl. It was an inspired choice: Liaigre has a natural affinity with islands. He was born in La Rochelle, the port city on France's Atlantic Coast, which he remembers as "a place that adventurers were always ready to leave from for their voyages. It was full of navigators' houses, people who traveled a lot and mixed cultures together. So you have eighteenth-century houses with African or Polynesian pieces in them, which I find very modern." With works in progress in Bangkok, Northern Spain, Kuala Lumpur, and Hamburg, Liaigre retreats to his own houses on France's Ile de Ré or St. Barth's for a break. There he indulges in a passion for sculpture that is often revealed in his furniture designs. For Nars, for instance, he has created dining chairs inspired by Maori totems and lava tables with the feel of Tiki-men carvings.
Liaigre, too, was enchanted by Motu Tane. "It was very Robinson Crusoe," he says, recalling his first visit in July 2000. "There was no comfort, not even electricity. I adored that—and wanted to keep it exactly the way it was, just sorted out a little!" But the gregarious Nars intended to entertain legions of his friends and family, so this approach, if poetic, was impractical. The logistics of the transformation were not for the fainthearted. The team faced "every challenge that you can imagine and more," Nars says. Engineers were summoned from France; ecologists from Australia worked on the water and utilities systems, so that essential pipes laid to the mainland didn't disturb the fragile reefs and their exotic denizens.
To celebrate his acquisition, Nars treated himself to a rare morocco-bound first edition of Cook's Three Voyages, relating the adventures of the famous explorer. Nars soon added to this purchase, and now his impressive library of Tahitiana—as well as antique Maori artifacts and the inspiring Gauguin-era photography that has influenced his own Tahitian portraits—is displayed in the sanctuary of a reading room out of Somerset Maugham (but defiantly updated with a cinema-sized flat-screen TV for all those classic movies).
By the time Liaigre arrived on Motu Tane, Nars was already armed with an avalanche of research into traditional Tahitian architecture. Like Nars, Liaigre was seduced by the Polynesians. "It's a very special culture," says Liaigre. "The people have a great freedom of being, of traveling about freely, of going to sleep no matter where. There's a sense of benefiting from the generosity of nature—the heat, the fruit, the fresh fish."
Liaigre captured this spirit, creating a village enclave built around a communal living area that would resemble the fare potee, or island meeting house, once central to Tahitian communities. Another structure, with views to Bora Bora itself, would provide bedroom suites for Nars and his parents, and there would be separate library and kitchen buildings and a substantial staff compound, protected from cyclones within a volcanic-rock wall. To accommodate Nars's friends there are now eight fares, or guest bungalows, as well as a photography studio. Liaigre, as is his custom, worked with his craftspeople in France on the furniture and elements for the island's fares; even the chestnut lathes for the ceilings (chosen for that wood's resistance to termites) were constructed in sections in Paris and assembled on the island. "I avoided color," says Liaigre, who created most of the furnishings in his signature dark African and Thai woods, "because the colors of nature here, the sea and all the greenery, are so strong."
Liaigre introduced Nars to Pascal Cribier, the Parisian landscape designer who has worked for such demanding patrons as Pierre Bergé, and for Versailles. "Pascal is more than just a landscape designer," Nars says enthusiastically. "He's a visionary, a poet, an artist. He felt there was a perfect balance between the lagoon, the ocean, and the mountain." Cribier has created elliptic beds of ferns "that will move like the waves on the lagoon," laid out to a pattern that resembles a fifties Homemaker design.
"I was blessed to have Christian and Pascal together," Nars says. "We all fell in love at the same time with the place. To be able to make something coherent that works, you have to feel the culture, feel the South Seas and the spirit of the place."
To transform the bleak soccer field that filled the center of the island, Nars planted a grove of 1,500 mature coconut palms. They arrived stacked on a barge like an extraordinary floating forest. Now the grove whispers seductively in the breeze and creates its own cool retreat from the unrelenting sun that assails the beach, its unusually pristine, pale sand specially dredged from the lagoon. Twice a year, the palms are denuded of their fruit for safety's sake; a falling coconut can cause considerable mischief if you happen to find yourself beneath it.
"The kitchen," Nars says, "is a very important room." A summons to dine—a siren wail coaxed from a giant conch by the majordomo (clad, like the rest of the staff, in pareos that Nars has designed based on those in nineteenth-century photographs)—is a promise of treats to come. Nars's gourmet chef creates wonders with the local fish, vegetables, and fruit, and is also responsible for concocting the house specialty: an irresistibly deadly piña colada made from rum, fresh pineapple juice, and homemade coconut ice cream.
Since he arrived in this far-flung paradise, Nars has been "willing and hungry to see and learn about Tahitian culture." Local sewing circles of weavers are invited to create traditional palm-frond baskets or flower coronets and leis made from bougainvillea and tiare, the fragrant national flower that also scents his guest bedrooms. "The Tahitians are very festive people," Nars says. "They love dancing, parties, celebrating, having fun. Anything is an excuse for a party in Tahiti!" He regularly invites local troupes of dancers to perform the sinuous aparima—the storytelling dance of the hands—or the erotic otea, or to engage in dazzling flame-throwing feats. Or he might host the splendid ladies of Irma's himene choir, dressed in prim missionary Mother Hubbards made up in eye-popping psychedelic prints. Some of these feisty and engaging ladies are old enough to remember the Tahiti immortalized in the great director F. W. Murnau's iconic 1931 silent movie Tabu, filmed with local unknowns and telling a dramatic story of illicit island love tainted by Western culture. At night under the stars and the rustling palms the himene ladies sing their haunting hymns to the hypnotic lilt of guitar and ukulele—a scene that Gauguin would have recognized a century ago.
"I try to create a little private world here," Nars says. "Being on an island, you can cut yourself off from the rest of world. With, of course, the modern technology of today: We can watch still a great DVD of Tabu!"
"Ticket to Paradise" by Hamish Bowles has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the December 2004 issue of Vogue.
Get more articles like this delivered to your door each month! Click here to subscribe today.
His first adventures in maquillage involved metamorphosing his glamorous sloe-eyed mother, Claudette, into the embodiment of the Valkyries he admired stalking through the heady Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton photographs that French Vogue published in the seventies. Later, as the maestro visagiste of eighties fashion, he transformed Naomi, Linda, Christy, et al into runway deities to fulfill the visions of designers as disparate as Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, and Valentino, and into studio goddesses for photographers such as Meisel, Newton, Avedon, and Penn. He created another career for himself when he established his cosmetics line in 1994. And, after finding that he couldn't afford these high-powered photographers to create images for his own campaigns, he decided to take the pictures himself.
For Nars, photography was "basically the same gesture as doing makeup: making somebody look beautiful, which is definitely a gesture of love in a way." It also opened up a whole new world of glamorous transformation that reflects his enduring engagement with the limelight-and-spangles world of the silver screen. "I'm a very nostalgic person; I love the past," he says. "People say, 'You have to live with the present and the future.' I don't really care. Honestly, I'd rather watch Seven Sinners with Marlene Dietrich than Catwoman with Halle Berry. We've come to a time when unfortunately everything has to be 'real,'" he sniffs disapprovingly. "But we love the fantasy!"
It was watching movies like that forties Dietrich classic that turned the infant Nars on to Hollywood's image of the South Seas, a world of pirates and illicit romance. "Tahiti was such a faraway, magic place," he remembers. "I guess it was always a dream to go there." But during three decades of a career that saw him crisscrossing the world in pursuit of perfect island locations from the Seychelles to the Caribbean, he never followed his childhood yen to explore Polynesia. That had to wait for the millennium, when he took a family vacation, island-hopping to places whose very names—Huahine, Mo'orea, Bora Bora—suggest exotic adventure.
"As soon as I arrived in Bora Bora I felt something profound," Nars says. "I was just mesmerized by the colors and the structure of the island. It struck me very, very strongly." So much so that he made inquiries about the availability of land on the main island—or even a motu, one of the infinity of little coral islands that form the Tahitian archipelago, scattered across the Pacific to an area almost the size of Europe.
Such a paradise was indeed available. Motu Tane ("Island of Universal Love" or "Island of Man") was once home to the late French explorer and anthropologist Paul Émile Victor. Celebrated for his work in the North Pole, Victor had retired to the warm embrace of this enchanting coral hideaway in the shadow of Bora Bora's mighty volcano, Mount Otemanu. A helicopter view of the motu reveals a miraculous Matisse cutout of concentric elliptic circles: the island's lush green lapped with platinum-blond sand, set in waters of further rings of aquamarine, jade, and the lustrous sapphire that defines the depths of the Pacific beyond the reefs. Nars was bewitched. "I thought that buying an island was very glamorous," he says, still dazzled by his naïveté, "without thinking at all about what it would take to make it look the way it looks now. Now it's definitely a fantasy island, totally comfortable and self-sufficient. But to get to that point was very complicated!"
To realize his dream, Nars enlisted the help of the distinguished interior designer Christian Liaigre, whose work he had admired at Manhattan's Mercer hotel and chez tastemakers such as Calvin and Karl. It was an inspired choice: Liaigre has a natural affinity with islands. He was born in La Rochelle, the port city on France's Atlantic Coast, which he remembers as "a place that adventurers were always ready to leave from for their voyages. It was full of navigators' houses, people who traveled a lot and mixed cultures together. So you have eighteenth-century houses with African or Polynesian pieces in them, which I find very modern." With works in progress in Bangkok, Northern Spain, Kuala Lumpur, and Hamburg, Liaigre retreats to his own houses on France's Ile de Ré or St. Barth's for a break. There he indulges in a passion for sculpture that is often revealed in his furniture designs. For Nars, for instance, he has created dining chairs inspired by Maori totems and lava tables with the feel of Tiki-men carvings.
Liaigre, too, was enchanted by Motu Tane. "It was very Robinson Crusoe," he says, recalling his first visit in July 2000. "There was no comfort, not even electricity. I adored that—and wanted to keep it exactly the way it was, just sorted out a little!" But the gregarious Nars intended to entertain legions of his friends and family, so this approach, if poetic, was impractical. The logistics of the transformation were not for the fainthearted. The team faced "every challenge that you can imagine and more," Nars says. Engineers were summoned from France; ecologists from Australia worked on the water and utilities systems, so that essential pipes laid to the mainland didn't disturb the fragile reefs and their exotic denizens.
To celebrate his acquisition, Nars treated himself to a rare morocco-bound first edition of Cook's Three Voyages, relating the adventures of the famous explorer. Nars soon added to this purchase, and now his impressive library of Tahitiana—as well as antique Maori artifacts and the inspiring Gauguin-era photography that has influenced his own Tahitian portraits—is displayed in the sanctuary of a reading room out of Somerset Maugham (but defiantly updated with a cinema-sized flat-screen TV for all those classic movies).
By the time Liaigre arrived on Motu Tane, Nars was already armed with an avalanche of research into traditional Tahitian architecture. Like Nars, Liaigre was seduced by the Polynesians. "It's a very special culture," says Liaigre. "The people have a great freedom of being, of traveling about freely, of going to sleep no matter where. There's a sense of benefiting from the generosity of nature—the heat, the fruit, the fresh fish."
Liaigre captured this spirit, creating a village enclave built around a communal living area that would resemble the fare potee, or island meeting house, once central to Tahitian communities. Another structure, with views to Bora Bora itself, would provide bedroom suites for Nars and his parents, and there would be separate library and kitchen buildings and a substantial staff compound, protected from cyclones within a volcanic-rock wall. To accommodate Nars's friends there are now eight fares, or guest bungalows, as well as a photography studio. Liaigre, as is his custom, worked with his craftspeople in France on the furniture and elements for the island's fares; even the chestnut lathes for the ceilings (chosen for that wood's resistance to termites) were constructed in sections in Paris and assembled on the island. "I avoided color," says Liaigre, who created most of the furnishings in his signature dark African and Thai woods, "because the colors of nature here, the sea and all the greenery, are so strong."
Liaigre introduced Nars to Pascal Cribier, the Parisian landscape designer who has worked for such demanding patrons as Pierre Bergé, and for Versailles. "Pascal is more than just a landscape designer," Nars says enthusiastically. "He's a visionary, a poet, an artist. He felt there was a perfect balance between the lagoon, the ocean, and the mountain." Cribier has created elliptic beds of ferns "that will move like the waves on the lagoon," laid out to a pattern that resembles a fifties Homemaker design.
"I was blessed to have Christian and Pascal together," Nars says. "We all fell in love at the same time with the place. To be able to make something coherent that works, you have to feel the culture, feel the South Seas and the spirit of the place."
To transform the bleak soccer field that filled the center of the island, Nars planted a grove of 1,500 mature coconut palms. They arrived stacked on a barge like an extraordinary floating forest. Now the grove whispers seductively in the breeze and creates its own cool retreat from the unrelenting sun that assails the beach, its unusually pristine, pale sand specially dredged from the lagoon. Twice a year, the palms are denuded of their fruit for safety's sake; a falling coconut can cause considerable mischief if you happen to find yourself beneath it.
"The kitchen," Nars says, "is a very important room." A summons to dine—a siren wail coaxed from a giant conch by the majordomo (clad, like the rest of the staff, in pareos that Nars has designed based on those in nineteenth-century photographs)—is a promise of treats to come. Nars's gourmet chef creates wonders with the local fish, vegetables, and fruit, and is also responsible for concocting the house specialty: an irresistibly deadly piña colada made from rum, fresh pineapple juice, and homemade coconut ice cream.
Since he arrived in this far-flung paradise, Nars has been "willing and hungry to see and learn about Tahitian culture." Local sewing circles of weavers are invited to create traditional palm-frond baskets or flower coronets and leis made from bougainvillea and tiare, the fragrant national flower that also scents his guest bedrooms. "The Tahitians are very festive people," Nars says. "They love dancing, parties, celebrating, having fun. Anything is an excuse for a party in Tahiti!" He regularly invites local troupes of dancers to perform the sinuous aparima—the storytelling dance of the hands—or the erotic otea, or to engage in dazzling flame-throwing feats. Or he might host the splendid ladies of Irma's himene choir, dressed in prim missionary Mother Hubbards made up in eye-popping psychedelic prints. Some of these feisty and engaging ladies are old enough to remember the Tahiti immortalized in the great director F. W. Murnau's iconic 1931 silent movie Tabu, filmed with local unknowns and telling a dramatic story of illicit island love tainted by Western culture. At night under the stars and the rustling palms the himene ladies sing their haunting hymns to the hypnotic lilt of guitar and ukulele—a scene that Gauguin would have recognized a century ago.
"I try to create a little private world here," Nars says. "Being on an island, you can cut yourself off from the rest of world. With, of course, the modern technology of today: We can watch still a great DVD of Tabu!"
"Ticket to Paradise" by Hamish Bowles has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the December 2004 issue of Vogue.
Get more articles like this delivered to your door each month! Click here to subscribe today.
