Gilded Youth

As the creative director of Baby Dior, CORDELIA DE CASTELLANE conjures a world of childhood fantasies, brought to life in her French country house.

- Lydia Slater

TO VISIT THE weekend home of the designer Cordelia de Castellane is to abandon humdrum reality for a fairytale. The noise and traffic of Paris gradually give way to silent roads lined with plane trees and high walls above which protrude the spires of distant palaces.

You turn off the main road to meander down a lane that appears to end abruptly at a pair of wrought-iron gates. Behind them, you glimpse two elegant limestone buildings the shape and colour of blocks of unsalted butter. “The house doesn’t really have a name,” Castellane says. “But we call it Le Bonbon.”

Standing at an upstairs window, half hidden behind a swaying curtain of Virginia creeper, is a curly-haired little boy. He is dressed all in white and has a pair of binoculars held to his eyes, the better to survey us. For a moment, I have a disconcerting sensation that I have strayed into the pages of The Little Prince.

And, of course, this is entirely appropriate, for in her role as creative director of Baby Dior, Castellane purveys an exquisite parental dream, in which dribble-free babies gurgle in frocks of floral-print silk organza, wide-eyed young girls pirouette in lambskin slippers, and tousle-haired boys submit happily to being buttoned into printed poplin shirts — a rose-tinted dream of innocence in which no child ever drops food down their front.