The Fabulous World of Harumi Klossowska de RolaPosted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Biography, Europe, Media Archive on 2015-09-28 02:14Z by Steven |
The Fabulous World of Harumi Klossowska de Rola
The New York Times Magazine
2015-09-22
Hilary Moss
 “Benoît, my partner, took this photo in 2013 in front of the Grand Chalet, which was a hotel until my father bought it. It is still loaded with thousands of books and even old skis from English clients. My mom has her studio there, Benoît has his studio, I have my own studio. It’s almost like apartments in a city — you can hear everyone’s muffled footsteps.” Credit: Benoît Peverelli |
Balthus’s jewelry-designing daughter reflects on her ethereal life in a historic Swiss chalet — and on memories of a singular childhood.
HARUMI KLOSSOWSKA DE ROLA’S first home was the massive Renaissance Villa Medici at the edge of the Borghese gardens, residence of the French Academy in Rome, which was run throughout the 1960s and much of the 1970s by her father, the painter Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus. Klossowska, now in her 40s, scoured the grounds for treasures such as pale pink stones and bits of blue-green glass from mosaics to show him. Later, she found that he had kept them all, close, in his bedside top drawer.
Such moments shaped the playful, Zen, otherworldly aesthetic of the designer, who conceives high jewelry pieces for Chopard and Boucheron and for her own line. After Balthus’s stint at the Academy ended when she was 5, the family home became the Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland, built in the mid-1700s, one of the largest wooden residential structures in Europe. She lives and works there still, with her partner, the photographer Benoît Peverelli, and their two children, as well as her mother, the Japanese-born painter Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, who was 34 years Balthus’s junior. They spend time as well at Castello de Montecalvello, a medieval Italian castle that her father bought in 1967, where a half-brother, Stanislas, lives…
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