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To enjoy the de Gournay wallpaper designs at Le Meurice, take a look at our Superior Rooms, Park View with Balcony, our Executive Rooms, Park View with Balcony and our Executive Junior Suite.
Art and culture
Discover de Gournay’s artisanal excellence
June 18, 2021
This family-run company specialises in creating the world’s finest hand-painted wallpaper designs. Find out the secrets behind their success and where you can see their exquisite work at Le Meurice.
Celebrated for Chinoiserie
Originally founded in 1984, by Claud Cecil Gurney and his nephew Dominic Evans-Freke, de Gournay is now headed up by Claud’s daughters, Hannah and Rachel. The brand brings interiors to life with engaging recreations of historic painted papers and arresting contemporary and bespoke designs. They’re celebrated for their vibrant Chinoiserie, Japanese & Korean and Panoramic collections, and particularly enjoy applying their bespoke expertise to projects with leading designers of the age.
Committed to creativity
Their commitment to creative innovation and recruiting the talents of true artists is obvious in all their work. Through a focused vision to elevate artisanal skills and technical brilliance, they’ve transitioned from being a niche supplier to leading the way in their specialist field.
Love of tradition
Claud Cecil Gurney’s passion for China’s history, art and culture led him to launch de Gournay and set up a studio in China. He employed artists to faithfully recreate traditional wallpaper designs by hand, using traditional techniques dating back hundreds of years. While modern technology has allowed great advancements in their creation of a variety of wallpapers, the emphasis is still on tradition. It’s the natural variations created by human hand that contribute to the unique beauty of the finished result.
Designs at Le Meurice
In two of our rooms at Le Meurice, we have wonderful examples of de Gournay’s Chinoiserie motifs. In our Superior Rooms, Park View with Balcony, you can discover the ‘Temple Newsam’ design, a stylised rendition of an idyllic English garden hand-painted onto a softly textured background of Moss Green Williamsburg. While in our Executive Rooms, Park View with Balcony, the ‘St. Laurent’ design is inspired by the antique panels once installed in the Parisian apartment of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, depicting a floral vision of a splendid oriental garden – filled with peacocks, pomegranates and blooming flowers – hand-painted in richly saturated tones, upon a silk background. Finally, our Executive Junior Suites feature either the delightful ‘Chatsworth’ design in yellow or ‘Earlham’ in a pretty shade of pink.
Appreciated by designers
Our interior designer, Luc Berger, chose de Gournay wallpaper when refurbishing the two rooms mentioned above, to create a natural dialogue with the famous Tuileries Garden they overlook. This has given them a strong personality and makes them entirely different from all of our other luxurious rooms and suites at Le Meurice. Judging by the wonderful reactions of our guests, this has been a very popular decision. Even without knowing the story of the craftsmanship behind these beautiful wallpapers, the effect they have is clear for all to see.
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