Castel Henriette
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Castel Henriette was a villa designed by the Art Nouveau architect Hector Guimard in Sèvres, France, in 1899. It was completed in 1900 and modified in 1903 with the removal of the look-out tower, and was demolished in 1969.
Guimard designed Castel Henriette for Mme. Hefty in 1899, the commission also including a secondary house, a garage and a fountain.[1] The site was gently sloping, with roads on three sides.[2] Completed in 1900, the villa was one of a series of early residential projects in which he increasingly integrated interior and exterior into complete works of the "New Art".[3] The exterior combined elements with medieval resonance; however in the interior, as he had at Castel Béranger, he left riveted girders visible in ceilings.[4] Guimard also designed the layout of the garden, which had a bulge evoking in the plan the pupil of an eye, facing the main salon; the entrance was on one corner, at 30o to the garden front.[5]
In 1903 Guimard removed the look-out tower, which had become unstable, and added a bow window on the façade facing Rue des Binelles.[1]
Castel Henriette fell into disuse before the Second World War, but during the 1960s was used as a setting in several films: Sans merveille (1963), La Ronde (1964), La Métamorphose des cloportes (1965), What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Flea in Her Ear (1968).[1]
The house was demolished in April 1969 despite efforts to save it.[1][6] It has an entry in the Base Mérimée,[2] and furniture designed for it is in the collection of the Bröhan Museum in Berlin[7] and decorative elements in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London[8] and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris,[9] which also has architectural plans and furniture designs and drawings.[10]
