Not all gardeners are as lucky—or as plucky—as Ingrid Donat. Forty-one years ago, she got a knock on her back door from the workmen she’d hired to excavate a plot at her new home outside Paris. “They told me, ‘We can’t do anything more, because you have too much clay,’ ” Donat recalls. “I was so happy! I said, ‘Give me a piece, please.’ And they set this clay on my kitchen table, with the stones and the grass and everything. I started to sculpt a self-portrait. I was pregnant, and it began like that.”
Multiple Pieces by Ingrid Donat, including the sofa and cocktail table, populate the living room. Donat also painted the apartment’s original ceiling beams. An artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat Hangs above a Donat-Designed Commode (at left); Walnut console by Charles Trevelyan
(At right).
A bronze Sculpture by Sylva Bernt stands in the garden.
“It” is a career at the pinnacle of contemporary decorative arts, a busy practice that has changed Donat’s life and brought pleasure to collectors around the world. Donat sculpts furni- ture and lighting in bronze, and her pieces have all the vibrancy and surface interest of expressionist paintings—catnip to AD100 designers like Peter Marino, Waldo Fernandez, and Robert Couturier, among others, and delectably on view in her current Paris home, a series of refined 17th-century rooms in the Marais. For those lacking an invitation, Donat is ably represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery; her son, Julien Lombrail, is a cofounder.
In the tradition of stylish European women working with grimy, recalcitrant metals—think Gabriella Crespi and Claude Lalanne, Osanna Visconti and Maria Pergay—Donat has forged a personal style out of her own eclectic background. She was born in France to a Swedish mother and a father from the island of Réunion, a French département east of Madagascar. Drawn to the tribal traditions of Africa and the simplicity of Swedish design, trained at the École des Beaux Arts, and schooled in French Art Deco by her then-husband, a collector and auction- eer, Donat moved quickly from sculpture to furnishings on the advice of her friend Diego Giacometti.
Donat in the bedroom doorway.
A chest by Donat stands in the bedroom.
Her one-bedroom Paris apartment is a self-made world. Even the doorknobs and the wood-paneled walls are her handiwork. What she hasn’t created, she’s restored in a way that honors the original craftsmanship of the building with stately proportions and painted, beamed ceilings. In the living room, where the ceiling decorations were too far gone to restore, Donat has “tattooed”—her word—an imagined tribal pattern in their place, a liberal but evocative rewriting of history worthy of Voltaire, whose works would have been circulating in the house’s heyday.
Twenty years ago, dissatisfied with conventional decorating fabrics, Donat started painting textiles with uneven stripes and using the results for pillows and upholstery. She’s combined her own soft furnishings with a few French classics: André Arbus armchairs in the living room; Pierre Jeanneret seating around a dining table illuminated by Frederik Molenschot’s lyrical swoop of a chandelier. Where a trendy decorator might have placed woven Tuareg mats underfoot, Donat has chosen vintage Moroccan carpets and kilims in sun-baked pinks and persimmons, rafts of color afloat in her earth-toned sea. “The color is on the floor and on my cheeks,” she says.
Donat hand-painted the fabric used to make the terrace sofa’s cushions. She also designed the cocktail tables and curved side chair.
A ceramic vessel by Roger Herman sits atop a table by Wendell Castle.
For all the confidence visible in her work, Donat still seems bemused by her success. “I never thought somebody wanted to buy this,” she says, glancing around at boiserie with a distinctly 21st-century valance she’s crafted from panels of distressed wood. “But everybody wanted to buy this, and after that I had too much work to do.” It’s convenient that, as Donat’s artistic reach has expanded, her son’s gallery has grown into the largest of its kind, with a cutting-edge produc- tion facility on the outskirts of Paris. Maybe it’s more than just convenient? When Julien was younger, Donat remembers, he once came to her with excitement in his eyes. “He told me, ‘Mommy, I finally know what I want to do with my life. I will take care of you.’ From the beginning, he made the gallery for me.”
The Donat-designed lacquer bed wears a textile from Uzbekistan. Donat also designed the bedside lamps and bench.
Pierre Jeanneret chairs surround the Donat-designed dining table. Bronze chandelier
by Frederik Molenschot.
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