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sk decorator Jacques Garcia why
he has spent the past few decades
finessing Château du Champ de
Bataille, his 17th-century pleasure
dome in Normandy, and refused
to be seduced by other delectable
old properties that would have
benefited from his expert ministra-
tions, and one receives an answer
that comes from the heart.
“I am a man of one love; I
cannot cheat,” says the silver-fox
Parisian known for conjuring
up glamorous hotel interiors, from
Hôtel Costes and La Réserve in
Paris to Marrakech’s La Mamounia
and Manhattan’s NoMad. “When
I cheat, I leave.”
Several years ago, though, Champ de Bataille had reached
a certain maturity—read all about it in Twenty Years of Passion
(Flammarion), a 400-page billet-doux to the monument
historique that he has owned since 1992—that led the AD100
interior designer to feel that he could allow his eye to wander,
to establish yet another historic foothold for him to restore
and his friends to enjoy. Eventually Garcia found what he was
seeking in Sicily, where he stumbled across a former monas-
tery, also dating from the 1600s, that had gone to rack and
ruin in the rolling, rocky countryside within sight of Noto, a
once-sleepy, rather remote, but increasingly buzzy baroque
city at the island’s southeast corner.
Like Sicily itself, imprinted over 1,000 years by the taste
and vocabulary of foreign invaders, from Ostrogoths to Arabs
to Normans, the onetime domain of Jesuit monks turned out to
be a cultural layer cake. As Garcia observes, “This 17th-century
monastery is built on a 12th-century Norman villa, which
replaced a 10th-century Moorish palace, which replaced a fifth-
century Roman house, which replaced a Greek villa of the third
century before Jesus Christ.” In short, Champ de Bataille is
a mere novella compared to the epic poem that is the 247-acre
estate that Garcia has christened Villa Elena, in honor of the
Byzantine empress who became one of Christendom’s most
important converts.
“Saint Helena, for whom I have a passion, brought the
True Cross from Jerusalem to Constantinople, then from
Constantinople to Rome,” he says, fancifully adding, consid-
ering the journey, “One thinks that she would have gone to
Sicily.” The name that Garcia gave his Mediterranean getaway
seemed to be destined by Providence as much as by personal
preference. At about the same time the tastemaker signed the
deed, he came across three immense paintings, attributed to