Career
With a deep understanding of the classical, internationally acclaimed interior designer ROBERT COUTURIER brings his inimitable style and wit to each and every project Décor, Couturier believes above all else, must be appropriate to the architecture, to the clients and to the setting. The last thing he sees his interiors as are stage sets – rather, they are spaces for living people to move through and function in and in fact, they work superbly.
Above all, Robert Couturier can be said to lend a sense of connoisseurship, imagination, and even experimentation to the traditional design landscape.
As he likes to say himself, recalling the rich interiors in which he spent his childhood and youth, “lieutenant is to both grander and greater ends that one invents when one can start with one’s own past”
A graduate of the Ecole Camondo in Paris with a degree in interior architecture and design, Robert relocated from his native France to New York City in 1978, working first for Adam Tihany and then establishing his own design firm. In 1987 Robert made design history, when the billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith entrusted the 32-year-old Couturier with what would amount to the single greatest private commission of modern times: the re-conception, execution, and continuous embellishment – down to the last gilded detail – of Goldsmith’s 20,000-acre kingdom on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.
Robert also decorated Goldsmith’s Hacienda de San Antonio in Colima, Mexico, his Boeing 757 (“a flying carpet with a motor”), his double-width Manhattan townhouse and his historic French chateau. Robert continued executing grand-scale commissions throughout the United States, Europe, South America and Russia, building a list of top clients including Anne Hearst and Jay McInerney, Cecile David Weil, Fred Iseman, Frederic Fekkai and Vanity Fair special correspondent Amy Fine Collins.
In October 2014 he released his first monograph, Robert Couturier: Designing Paradises with Rizzoli New York, showcasing a beautiful range of his multifaceted work from Old World elegance to contemporary design.
In his introduction Couturier admits, “I’m completely addicted to luxury. I have no ability for anything else.”
Today with his team of architects and designers led by Michael Young, head of Architecture and Brian O’Connor, head of Decoration, Robert Couturier, Incorporated has become synonymous with continental and international style and elegance. Robert’s vast array of projects have graced the pages of numerous publications, including Architectural Digest, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Town and Country, the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, House and Garden, The Robb Report, Elle Décor and Wall Street Journal.
His name listed among Architectural Digest’s prestigious annual list of the Best Decorators And Architects In The World, Elle Decor’s A-list Top 60 Designers and British House & Garden’s Top 10 Foreign Decorators.
Additionally, Robert was honored to be included in the coveted top spot of Vanity Fair’s 2015 International Best-Dressed List. Robert, a voracious lover of the decorative arts, enjoys sharing his vast knowledge on art and design, lecturing at galleries and arts and antique fairs and by participating in charitable and design-industry events around the world.
