Interior Dialogue

JUAN PABLO MOLYNEUX lets zaneta cheng into his world, where minimalism is a semantic error, classical education supersedes all and dreams are but a stepping stone to his next refurbishment project

BASED IN NEW YORK and Paris, Chilean interior designer Juan Pablo Molyneux has cultivated a portfolio of haute-design that can be seen not only in his clients’ homes (such as the 40,000-square-foot palace for Sheikh Mohamed Bin Suhaim Al-Thani of Qatari royalty), but also in his coffee-table book Juan Pablo Molyneux: At Home. The tome opens up his own stunning homes in the US and France, and shows how reaching into the past can produce designs that defy time.

Having studied architecture at the Catholic University of Chile and later the École des Beaux-Arts and the École du Louvre in Paris, Molyneux opened his first interior design studio in Santiago in 1970, and another in Buenos Aires in 1975, only to move to New York eight years later, where he experienced astronomical success. In 2004, he was appointed a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

All this lends him an otherworldly quality. It helps that the man himself exudes a quiet, aristocratic air that aligns him more with his clientele than perhaps your typical interior designer.

His stories are certainly fantastic – four pages is simply inadequate to fit them all in. An oft-shared favourite is the way Molyneux was discovered in New York at the influential Kips Bay Decorator Show House by former Architectural Digest editor-in-chief, Paige Rense. Molyneux was given an attic to kit out, which he did – in red velvet, no less. Despite naysayers telling him that no one would see his space, Rense stopped by on her pre-opening private tour and had her secretary call Molyneux the next day with an invitation to meet over breakfast. Before he knew it, his rented New York home became Architectural Digest’s first double cover – and the rest is history.

YOU REFUSE TO HAVE YOUR STYLE LABELLED AS MAXIMALIST. WHY IS THIS?