Juan Pablo Molyneux
Juan Pablo Molyneux, owner of the château de Pouy-sur-Vannes in the Aube department, in the Champagne region of northeastern France, is one of the most admired architects and interior designers of his generation. A master of the classical vocabulary, he has devoted his career to bringing the grandeur of European decorative traditions into homes and institutions around the world.
Born in Chile, he studied architecture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, then continued his training in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École du Louvre. After his early years in Santiago and Buenos Aires, he settled in New York, where he built an international practice and became an American citizen. His work ranges from private residences on several continents to major institutional commissions, including the interiors of the Cercle de l'Union interalliée in Paris.
Paris has since become the center of his life and work. In the Marais, he restored the Hôtel Claude Passart, built in 1619 for a secretary to King Louis XIII. To bring the house back together, he bought it from eleven different owners. A painted ceiling dated 1620, long hidden under plaster, had saved the building from demolition and earned it its protected status. Today the hôtel is his Paris home, and its former stables house his studio, with interior design on one floor and architecture on the other.
In the early 2010s, he acquired the château de Pouy-sur-Vannes, a listed fortress whose origins go back to the 12th century, set in about 150 acres of park and woodland. For half a century it had served as a residence for members of the Legion of Honor. He gave it back the scale of a private home, with five bedrooms where there had been seventeen, and turned its vast attic into a spectacular room lined with fabric printed from Piranesi’s Prisons engravings. “There are two ways of looking at a château,” he says. “Either you make a museum, or you preserve the place by living in it.”
His commitment to heritage reaches well beyond his own houses. He is a trustee of the World Monuments Fund and helped create its French affiliate, World Monuments Fund France, where he serves as vice-president. He is also a trustee and vice-president of the American Friends of Versailles, and a trustee of the French Heritage Society. In 2004, the French Minister of Culture made him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
