“This is my house, a salon, a concert hall and a brothel”: a walk through the fascinating home of Serge Gainsbourg

In 1968 a Swiss magazine showed on its pages the new house of Serge Gainsbourg (Paris, 1928-1991).

The headline,

, was sufficiently justified by the description of the place: “All black.

Black from top to bottom.

Walls and ceilings.

Doors, windows, tiled in black and white checkerboard.

Even the day is black: a black wooden grill filters the white light black.

Little furniture (all black).

Strange objects: a huge tarantula under a glass sphere, an articulated crab that appears to be alive, a life-size skinned man.

It might seem like a place designed by a suicide bomber, and possibly it was: when the decorator Andrée Higgins received Gainsbourg, he told her of his desire to jump into the Seine.

The day before he had received a phone call from Almería.

It was Brigitte Bardot's secretary to ask her not to call her again.

Rumors of an alleged romance with Stephen Boyd on the set of the western

(1968)

they needed no further confirmation.

Gainsbourg had not considered Bardot's fickle character when just a couple of weeks ago he had urged him to buy that house and "build a palace from

where we could live our love."

About to turn forty, Serge lived in the Cité des Arts, a building located behind Notre Dame where he had applied for a scholarship as a resident trying to get out of his parents' house.

The paltry

from his jazz records weren't enough.

But in the two years that he had spent there, many things happened.

The main one, that Gainsbourg jumped to pop and that the planetary success —Eurovision triumph included— of a song written for France Gall,

he had brought with him mountains of money.

He entrusted the search for a house to Joseph, his father, putting two requirements: it must have a stately appearance and be located in the seventh Parisian department, read the neighborhood that extends from the Eiffel Tower to the Sorbonne.

Serge Gainsbourg in his Paris apartment, at the piano.Sergio Gaudenti (Sygma via Getty Images)

Serge Gainsbourg at home in Paris doing what he loved the most. Jerome Prebois (Sygma via Getty Images)

It was not an easy target, but on the

Verneuil, a small street near Orsay, Joseph found some old stables transformed into an independent two-story building.

Just what Serge was looking for, with the addition that the small size of the street seemed to distance it from the bustle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and that two of his great friends lived a couple of doorways away, the couple formed by the singer Juliette Gréco and the actor Michel Piccoli.

Bardot's shock seemed to condemn the house in advance, but what Gainsbourg did not count on was that shortly after he would meet a young British actress, Jane Birkin.

The infatuation was sudden and soon they both awaited the end of the conditioning works of their future home in the neighboring hotel l'Hôtel, the same one where Oscar Wilde had died seven decades before.

More information

60 kilometers of art in the open air: the spectacular Nantes estuary reinvents cultural tourism

It is there that Jane discovers the obsession that devours Serge with that house.

Fascinated by the reading of

he takes Joris-Karl Huysmans as a reference and aspires to make it an extension of himself.

Not always with reasonable criteria: Higgins remembered the day Gainsbourg showed up at the house with a huge chandelier to hang in the bathroom.

"At that height it will reach the ground and prevent access," he warned her.

Serge's response, pragmatic: "By washing less frequently, everything is solved."

Gainsbourg finally gave in and bought another, smaller one, which he would have installed over the bathtub.

When Higgins warned him of the danger of electrocution, he opted to cover it with thick safety glass rather than simply change it.

Nothing should undermine his aesthetic objective.

A ground floor as a single space with a piano on one side.

Two windows that open onto the garden.

In the background, a small kitchen and some stairs to access the upper floor.

Upstairs, the corridor and four rooms: an office, Jane's room, the bathroom and the common bedroom.

All black.

The only decoration, some life-size photographs of Bardot.

Birkin asked him to replace them with others from Marilyn;

the only fault that he put to that place that fascinated him, where each object was selected with artistic criteria and each work had a marked space.

She also confessed to feeling a little afraid of being left alone at home.

In 2021, on the 30th anniversary of Serge Gainsbourg's death, the facade of his house on Rue de Verneuil was covered with graffiti and tributes to the musician. Chesnot (Getty Images)

Some of the art pieces and gold records displayed in his recording studio.Maison Gainsbourg

Not as much as the one the girls went through.

Kate, daughter of Jane and composer John Barry, and Charlotte, who would soon arrive.

As long as they did not cross that space full of terrifying objects at night, they chose to sit at the window and pee in the garden.

Fitting the young into the home had not been easy.

Not because of the obvious lack of space, but because Gainsbourg could not find an aesthetic solution to the challenge of introducing a crib into his sanctuary.

He would end up locating one from the 19th century that he considered up to the task, but he preferred to hide it behind a portable room that he found in an antiques dealer.

When Kate grew older and her feet slipped out of her through her bars, Jane, fed up with seeing her forever cold, demanded a bed.

Do not even think about it.

Her counterproposal: make her sleep with socks on.

Things would get complicated when it was necessary to install the

, whom she placed behind an exquisite screen, and even more so with the birth of Charlotte.

No unsightly bunk beds.

The puzzle would only be solved when Jane found a mahogany bed that didn't offend her artistic sense.

The vigilance so that nobody distorted that mausoleum was exercised

.

Unthinkable that no one touched a single object;

if so, Serge would soon appear with a rag to clean it up and put it back in its proper space.

Whoever used the bathroom had to leave it without leaving a trace of his passage;

he only used the bathtub by previously placing a silk sheet on its bottom, something that was sublimely exquisite to him.

His walks through antique shops and galleries on the

were continuous: an 18th-century English dentist's chair, astrakhan tapestries with figures of men smiling while being tortured, Japanese statuettes, rats sculpted in bronze, automata monkeys, a painting by Dalí, or the sculpture of Claude Lalanne

who would end up giving the title and cover to a legendary album.

Difficult to fit everything into a house in which the four members of the family and the

were joined by a Senegalese butler, Mamadou, and the dog Nana.

"This is my home.

And I don't know what it is: a salon, a concert hall, a brothel or a museum”, Gainsbourg said in 1979. By then, Jane had begun to feel cornered by that

In her diaries, she laments: “In most houses there is a cozy living room.

In this we have a museum.

Perched on a chair, terrified of breaking something, I stay in the kitchen or in my room.

Nor are they safe havens: the kitchen, the only space where you can get a glimpse of family life with the girls, is tiny;

The

that Serge exclaims every time he looks into his room and sees the disorder in which Jane lives are nothing but a sign of reproach.

He dreams of his own house where he can move freely.

He will find her in Cresseuville, a small town in Brittany.

Two small puppets that Gainsbourg commissioned of himself and for which he reserved a space in this velvet armchair in which they continue to this day.Maison Gainsbourg

Detail of the library of the house of Serge Gainsbourg.Maison Gainsbourg

Gainsbourg lived on

Verneuil for twenty-two years.

Twelve of them, next to Jane.

That's where she began to ponder the idea of ​​leaving him: tired of so much partying, so much alcohol, of invariably arriving home at dawn, just in time to kiss the girls before the au pair took them to

, her patience broke when the mood caused by the unexpected death of a friend was out of step with the triggered ego of a Gainsbourg who had become a media phenomenon.

One afternoon, in her room, she was emotionally kissing a young director named Jacques Doillon who had come up to offer her her first dramatic role.

Goodbye Verneuil

After a long period of doubt, Birkin closed his story with Gainsbourg with determination: "During a recording session for Serge I took my bag, left the studio, hailed a taxi and asked him to take me to the Hotel Pont-Royal", he noted in his diary.

It was the beginning of a new life with Doillon that plunged Gainsbourg into a pit from which he never came out.

He ended up rebuilding his life with a much younger woman, Bambou.

He never offered her a copy of the keys to

Verneuil, but he gave her an attic that he decorated in imitation of his house.

He was not the first clone: ​​when in 1980 the director Claude Berri offered him to accompany Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu in the cast of

Serge confessed that he did not feel safe outside the home.

Berri reproduced her to the millimeter in the studio and took most of her scenes to that set.

By then,

Verneuil had become a place of pilgrimage.

The popularity of its sole occupant led admirers to graffiti its walls into a perpetually renewed mural, forcing Gainsbourg to erect an exterior latticework to deter callers at any time of day or night.

Behind him, life was difficult and Serge was reluctant to let anyone in.

One of the few times he did it, it didn't end well: the singer Jacques Dutronc and the comedian Coluche took advantage of a moment when Serge disappeared to move everything around and wait for his reaction.

Françoise Hardy, Dutronc's wife, was uncomfortable at the scene: "When he came back from the kitchen and saw that we had altered the order of his things,

Neon of the Gainsbourg Museum located in front of what was his apartment in the 'rue' de Verneuil, with the recognizable profile of the singer.© Alexis Raimbault - Maison Gainsbourg, 2023

As if it were a last shield that protected him from a threatening present, Gainsbourg did not want to change anything in his sanctuary after Jane's departure.

The exception occurred when Charlotte, still a child, began to show an interest in cinema: she had the 16mm vertical projector with which she used to watch movies on the ceiling of her room lying on the bed removed and replaced it with a monstrous television, the largest on the market.

She invited Thomas, son of Hardy and Dutronc, the same age as Charlotte, to her premiere.

The kid came home crying: the movie Serge had chosen for the evening had been

.

The following weekend, however, Gainsbourg invited him back.

Upon arrival he proudly showed her a VHS copy of

which he had just obtained.

Bureaucratic complications, the difficulty in opening wheelchair access and the impossibility of maintaining the required social distance during the pandemic have delayed Charlotte's project to open 5 bis

Verneuil to the public for several years.

But after its declaration as heritage, the difficulties seem to have been resolved and, starting on September 20, it will be possible to visit one of the most unique artist residences the world has ever known, with the addition of a museum located in the old restaurant from the sidewalk across the street that so many times served as a refuge.

During that wait, the space could be savored when Charlotte decided to honor her mother by making her the protagonist of her documentary

.

She one morning she quoted him in

Verneuil.

Jane entered with awe: she had not crossed the threshold since Serge's death, three decades ago.

Everything was intact, just as it had been that day.

Mother and daughter toured their rooms, reeling off memories, caressing objects that were previously off limits.

Ashtrays full of

butts ;

in the refrigerator, already broken, the chocolate bars that Serge liked so much;

in a closet, his medicine bottles, which the years had decomposed.

“It's like being in Pompeii,” Jane noted.

“I always have the feeling that she is coming back,” added Charlotte.

Time seems to have stopped in the black house.

Felipe Cabrerizo is the author of the biography

Gainsbourg: pink elephants

Diaries 1957-1982.

Munkey Diaries

You can follow ICON on