Chez Lamy

The French polymath Michèle Lamy and her daughter, the artist Scarlett Rouge, are two free yet interconnected spirits who navigate this mortal coil with an innate lightness. Without pretense, they preach a sort of detachment from mediocrity that I’ve appreciated since meeting them over a decade ago.

‍

My first interview with Lamy and her husband, the American fashion designer Rick Owens, was a Sunday brunch in 2013, where a handsome chef cooked me eggs at the kitchen table overlooking the terrace of their home on the Place du Palais Bourbon in Paris. If you’ve not had the pleasure, the apartments (and previously Owenscorp HQ) appear Haussmannian on the outside, but upon ascending a concrete staircase and pulling aside the Jean Prouvé porthole doors, you are immediately immersed in Owens’ concrete world. You could also call it Lamyland—a word that has been applied to all sorts of physical manifestations of Lamy’s fertile creative mind, from a heady perfume to group art shows to pop-ups and happenings around the world. Today, it’s all a bit potato, po-ta-toe; for Owens and Lamy’s aesthetic liaison is a case of the chicken and the egg, with each bringing a myriad of life experiences, readings, references, and urges to their sprawling cultural footprint in Paris and beyond.

The tradition of entertaining is one Lamy has perpetuated through- out her lifetime in diverse manifestations, the most historic being her late ’90s brainchild, Les Deux Cafés. Situated just south of Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles between 1996 and 2003, Lamy’s restaurant-cum-nightclub began with the ambitious transplant and remodeling of a turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts bungalow with the help of the late decorator-to-the-stars Paul Fortune. Together, they set the scene for a swinging Provençal haunt that welcomed movie stars, musicians, and jet-set types looking for a quiet spot away from prying eyes and camera lenses to enjoy French food and good company late into the night, with private tables sequestered away in various rooms of the house. In 1998, the Los Angeles Times’ (since unmasked) secret critic S. Irene Virbila reviewed Les Deux Cafés, and with it Lamy herself. “She may not notice—or care—that you’ve been waiting more than a half-hour for dessert, but she pays attention to whom you’re with and what you’re wearing. The wait staff are all independent spirits who bring you your menus, food, and wine at their own inscrutable pace.”

‍

A few years later, in 2003, the pair returned to Lamy’s native France as Owens’ fashion business continued to grow in notoriety and scale. They set up shop in the aforementioned apartments and began a new life that would see Owens come into his own as the outré American in Paris, and Lamy’s creative universe expanded perpetually, too. Alongside all the fashionable comings and goings of team members, adopted models, Bengal cats, and the like, the kitchen at the Place du Palais Bourbon has been a revolving door for young chefs, including Congolese chef Dieuveil Malonga’s Afro-fusion; Isis Neal, who cut her teeth at Les Deux Cafés; and the New York-based Ivorian chef Rōze Traore. Scarlett, too, has played her part, beginning with the odd shift at Les Deux Cafés to more recent stints, such as catering “Bargel” during Frieze London in 2014, Lamyland’s three-day salon on a barge.

‍

As the culinary blueprint of the Lamy-Owens household has chopped and changed over the years, so has the way in which food is served. To wit, Lamy has spearheaded the collection of homewares that complement the designer’s monolithic furniture, with such weighty flights of fancy as Pakistani rock crystal chalices, snail spoons carved from ox bone and housed in camel fur envelopes, and polished bronze plates that dare to outshine their contents during Lamy’s inevitably candlelit dinners. The absolute dichotomy of lavish opulence and primal simplicity in their prodigious output is palpable. It’s a testament to their lives lived in constant movement, balancing the routine with the radical in a mythical formula that is all their own.

“We are the Munsters... and we love ourselves.”
— Scarlett Rouge

Dan Thawley: Michèle, you grew up in Jura, France. Can you tell us about some of your family traditions from the mountain region? What are your earliest memories of food and drink?

‍

Michèle Lamy: My parents were in the French Resistance. My father grew up in the woods around Oyonnax, and my mother was the daughter of Louis and Angele Poncet. Her father was a famous chef in Lyon and Villars-les-Dombes; he provided food to 53 restaurants and several farms. My mother spent a lot of time on her bicycle bringing food to the Resistance in the woods: This is how my parents met and why I was born in 1944. We al- ways had a chef in the house, and me and my sister and brother spent some holidays later on in Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne, where my grandfather and especially his wife— he died early—took us to visit farms and play in the orchards and dining rooms. I was aware very early on that you have to eat what’s in season, not only organic but from the farms. DT: Scarlett, what about you

‍

Scarlett Rouge: Well, my earliest memory was in the crib: I could see light coming through my partially open door and could hear my parents entertaining. I was jumping up and down, probably screaming because I wanted to join the party. I recall a grand affair in our newly renovated house in Hancock Park, Los Angeles, when I was around 5 years old; three di- vas were dancing on an inner balcony that came off my parents’ room into a loft-sized living room packed to the brim with guests frolicking below.

‍

DT: Michèle, how did your move to LA change your life?

‍

ML: I did not move to the States for the food but for the music. It was only later when I settled in LA around the time of Scarlett’s birth—when the food “revolution” started with the first farmer’s market on Hollywood Boulevard—that I first opened Café des Artistes and then Les Deux Cafés. Alice Waters from Chez Panisse was our mentor; David Wynns was my young, clever chef. We read a lot of M.F.K. Fisher.

‍

DT: What brought you back to Paris after all those years abroad? You once told me it was because you found your dream house?

‍

ML: After all those years in LA, French friends would pass by and ask me, “When are you coming back?” and I would say, “When I live on the Place du Palais Bourbon.” In the same sense, I could have said, “When I live by the Eiffel Tower,” meaning never! But then, one day, a girlfriend told me she found my place.

‍DT: Scarlett, you’ve lived in LA, Turin, and Paris... anywhere I’ve missed? Now you are outside Paris in the countryside.

‍

SR: As far as I am concerned, LA is a bunch of overgrown farming villages that have amalgamated in- to a beast of a city qui a ni queue ni tête (“who has neither tail nor head”) and no real heart center, which makes it sometimes difficult for foreigners to appreciate it. Sixty years ago when my father was a kid, it was still mainly agricultural. One minute, you were shopping on Melrose, the next walking up the untamed hills with a pack of coyotes. That has changed a lot since a wave of New Yorkers started to move there a couple of decades ago. The city has definitely come into a new era, and the density has inevitably caused the wildness to recede, which is why it no longer feels like home to me. I may be an LA girl, but I have never been a city dweller. Paris is a beautiful jewel, way too tame for me. Every tree is planted exactly 10 meters apart. Out here in la Forêt de Fontainebleau, with a fast train to where it is happening, we have found our sweet spot.

‍

DT: You’ve been soaked in your mom’s creative milieu of artists and creative personalities since you were a girl. Do you have any memories of early mentors or characters you encountered along the way that inspired you as an artist?

‍

SR: My parents would often leave me with one of my many artist nannies so they could go to an art opening, only to find me and the nanny at the same event. Later, when I was in art school, mentors and I never saw eye to eye. I think it was because from a young age, I was surrounded by so many people who followed the beat of their own drum and succeeded by sheer will and self-determination.

‍

DT: Are there some traditions of entertaining in your family that you have kept alive?

‍

SR: You will usually find me cooking up a feast while reading our guests’ tarot cards in the kitchen, and I fully intend to pass both skills down.

‍

ML: Well said, my darling...

‍

DT: What are some alternative ways of living that have become important to you over the years?

‍

SR: I think my whole life has been alternative. The only time I was made aware of my differences was when I lived in Lyon, and les petits bourgeois would shout at me in the streets for the way I dressed. Because I was a teenager, it hurt a bit. So, for a brief moment, I started wearing my aunt’s clothes. Today, where gender is fluid and identity is a dime a dozen, it’s all normal to me. We are the Munsters, and we love ourselves. If that seems alternative, I’m sorry, this is not your century.

‍

DT: What are your rituals?

‍

ML: Japanese dye for my hair and fingers. There is a big bathroom with a hammam on the fifth floor of our place in Paris. It’s my tradition to go there to start the morning, followed by cigarettes and a cup of black tea. That is where I get all my ideas. For breakfast, I always have un œuf uf à la coque (“a boiled egg”).

‍

SR: I walk every morning in the forest with our beagle and hug a few trees. When I step into my studio, I per- form my version of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram from the [Hermetic] Order of the Golden Dawn. It is a ceremony that helps me clear the space of noise so I can hear the soul’s voice.

DT: Scarlett, the mural you painted at Rick and Michèle’s house at Place du Palais Bourbon [seen in this story] has played the backdrop to so many cultural events, private dinners, and family moments.

‍

SR: It was the middle of the night when I first received an email from Rick asking me to paint it. His only prompt was that it should be like [Pablo Picasso’s] Guernica. On one level, it is about our family: Rick the dominating bull and Michèle screaming, as always, “Where is my phone?” (She almost burnt down the building the first week they moved in there.) I’m the egg flying away on one of my many moves back and forth between the old and new country. It was a secret surprise for Michèle, and I only had 10 days to complete the project. In truth, he had asked me to do it as a kind of revenge because she had bought an expensive artwork he didn’t like. I thought it would be painted over after a few years but it remains, and the house would feel naked without it.

‍

Talent MICHÈLE LAMY, SCARLETT ROUGE, NICÉE LUCIA, and PETRA LUNE.
Hair Stylist DIANA PAYTON.
Makeup Artist LISA MICHALIK.
Manicure ALEX FELLER.
Lighting Director RYAN O’TOOLE.
Photo Assistants FLOSSIE STRICKLAND and ROSALIE NGUYEN VAN PHU.