Artist, artistic director and architect Alexandre de Betak first started travelling to Mallorca in his 20s, irresistibly drawn to the island’s rugged shoreline and remote mountaintop villages. The unhurried existence of the locale provided a counterpoint to the frenetic pace of life as fashion’s consummate showman – which saw de Betak conjure catwalk spectacles, exhibitions and events, and design lighting and furniture for everyone from Raf Simons to John Galliano. Working collaboratively with designers to bring their vision to life on the runway, until recently de Betak would design, creative direct and live-produce fashion shows, choreographing the lights and music. When Simon Porte Jacquemus took over the Palace of Versailles – or a Provençal lavender field – to show his collection, it was de Betak who made it happen.
It was de Betak’s earliest client, the Spanish fashion designer Sybilla, who introduced him to the Balearics, and in 2008 he set about designing and building an otherworldly Flintstones-style property on the north-west coast. “I got hooked,” he says of the experience, which spurred de Betak and his wife, Sofia Sanchez de Betak, to embark on the next chapter of island life. After selling a majority stake in Bureau Betak, the company he founded in Paris in 1990 (to a group where he serves as creative chair), he has stepped back from live production and turned his attention to focus on interior architecture and design. His company, Takbe Studio, which has offices in Paris, draws on his conceptual, and highly creative, approach to spaces. Having produced more than 1,500 shows, it is something of a seismic shift in pace for de Betak; although if things started low-key, the company is growing. “I decided to quite drastically change from one life to another,” he says of his career pivot, which is driven, to some degree, by a desire to create something more permanent and environmentally aware, as well as a more harmonious life balance. “I’m very happy to be working on things that last longer than the few minutes of a fashion show.” Not your average interior designer, he says: “I love doing houses. But I work for others as though it’s for myself, I don’t compromise.” Not that it’s deterred the handful of high-end (anonymous) clients who have already hired him.
Each of de Betak’s interiors projects – whether a 17th-century hôtel particulier in Paris or a stripped-back SoHo loft – has been radically different. His latest, a light-touch renovation of a four-bedroom mid-18th-century finca in the foothills of the Tramuntana mountains, where he occasionally spends time together with Sofia and their six-year-old daughter, Sakura, is no exception. (De Betak also has two sons, Amaël and Aidyn.) Though secluded – there is little around but ancient olive groves and grazing sheep – it’s accessible; Palma is 30km to the south. “We’d been looking for a project that’s something different for a while,” says the peripatetic designer. “I’m always dreaming of untouched places, but it’s so hard to find somewhere authentic.” Although Mallorca is brimming with old farmhouses, most have been unsympathetically modernised and overly polished, or are simply not for sale.
After a long search, Sofia spotted this rare gem – raw and unrefined with a timeworn limestone façade – while out driving. Once they had met the owner, an elderly woman whose father had spent time restoring the place during the 1930s and who had no family to pass it on to, it was theirs. Typical of these rural dwellings, it was originally built as much for animals and agriculture as for people, with the entire ground and top floors given over to grain storage. It had precisely the crumbling, uninhabited patina de Betak is drawn to. The walls were cracked, the plumbing and electricity minimal (water still comes from the well) but, he says, “we loved it as it was”.
De Betak’s goal, partly to circumnavigate the lengthy process of permissions, was to design a temporary fix for the interior to make it more workable. As he is a self-confessed “light freak”, sorting the electrics to better illuminate the interior was of primary concern. Rather than working in stages, he tends to picture a finished space almost instantaneously and in totality, from the furnishings he will source, pulled from his vast archive, to the design and build, right down to the curtains and the cutlery. His vision for the finca was enacted to the extreme: to dress almost the entire interior – walls, ceilings, windows, upholstery and detailing – in pure white antique “marriage” linen from the 19th and 20th century. “These old fincas are beautiful but I wanted to warm it up,” says de Betak, who collected hundreds of sheets (half from the local market, half from Marché Vernaison in Saint-Ouen), then worked on the elevations, carefully measuring the space before commissioning a local seamstress to stitch each sheet together piece by piece, like an enormous textile puzzle.
Guided both by necessity and playful aesthetics, the result is a series of rooms that are conceptual yet womb-like, calming and comfortable. “It’s like camping but not camping,” he says of the transitory, yet transportive, atmosphere. The linen skin that dresses the interior is hung in a makeshift manner, using dog clips and hooks. Its fabric drapes cleverly conceal a multitude of sins – and enabled de Betak to swiftly rework the plumbing and electrics without ever touching the surface of the walls.
Surprisingly chic, the textile treatment has been applied to all the bedrooms (Sakura’s room is cherry-blossom pink) as well as the sitting room. Here, the painted floors are layered with unusual milky-white Turkish carpets sourced from Istanbul. At the far end of the room is a row of Sarfatti chairs by Marcello Piacentini, each loaded with books on everyone from James Turrell to Madeleine Castaing and bound in white. Even the once black bungee cords on the René Herbst tubular metal Sandows dining chairs from 1928 have been customised with white elastic cords. “I design in a childlike way,” says de Betak. “I like places to be alive and fun and relaxed.” Buried beneath the linen are LED lights that softly illuminate the space by night, and along the entire length of the wall is a broad, pillowy, modular daybed that he custom-created. “It’s not just about preservation,” he says. “I like things to evolve.”
The entire living space is an idiosyncratic assortment of objects and furnishings; a turn-of-the-century Fortuny lamp, a brutalist glass table, a Frank West 1990s light, retro-futuristic Elipson speakers and the snaking form of a 1970s Boalum light from Artemide. Suspended above the dining room table is a pair of large, bell-shaped light shades, each covered in delicate dried leaves, sourced from the Paul Bert Serpette flea market in Paris. “It’s a weird mix,” says de Betak, who is less preoccupied by objects’ provenance than with creating the right balance. Similar to a fashion show, making memorable spaces is for him all about evoking a feeling. Here, the intention was to summon a pared-back style that’s visually inspiring but also restful. The overriding emotion is one of wonder. “It shows you can have this very lovely historic house but inhabit it in a very natural way,” he says.
The atrium, however, is another story. A shiny lacquered black box, the floor is daubed with the high-gloss resin yacht paint. Only the original mustard-yellow frames around the doors, and the 1980s disco lights stacked on the stairs (a throwback to his teen days of arranging lights and music at “boum” parties) punctuate the alien atmosphere.
If there is a synchronicity between the experience of creating a catwalk show (although short-lived) and creating homes for clients, it’s that de Betak is a master of the atmospheric environment. “There was never time to change things,” he says of the intense tempo of the showspace renovation, which he is now, very deliberately, dialling down. “I don’t want to call it temporary,” he says, pondering where the space sits on the scale between ephemerality and permanence. “It’s a real sanctuary.”
For de Betak, this more fluid way of designing interiors offers him freedom – one that reaches its apex in the attic: a den-like hideaway. Looking out towards the shaded canopy of a pine tree that’s perfect for picnics, its exposed wooden beam-and-bamboo ceiling and chalky floors are part-desert encampment, part-celestial cave. But it is within the stripped-back interior that de Betak from time to time engages in his own form of creative thinking. The space is a blank page.
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