When the French gallerist Yves Gastou bought the Ermitage de Douce-amie – or retreat of a sweet friend – a silly castle on the outskirts of Biarritz in south-west France in 1990, it had the air of a place frozen in time. Tucked away in a forest of bamboo and pine, bay and oak trees, the 5,380-square-foot home it was it was built in 1900 as a nursing home for a member of Napoleon III’s imperial court, or so Gastou believed. The house had changed hands only a few times since then: The woman he bought it from was one of the last ladies in Biarritz to travel by horse and cart.
For Gastou, a decorative arts and antiques dealer who died in 2020 at age 72, the house, with its faded blue concrete facade and roughly 40-foot-tall turret, fulfilled romantic fantasies of knights and fortified towers rooted in childhood Travel in Carcassonne; grew up near that medieval walled city in Limoux. As an adult, he lived most of the year in an apartment on the Quai Malaquais on the Left Bank of Paris, which was a short walk from the eponymous gallery he ran from 1986 until his death. The hermitage was his summer retreat, a place for months-long vacations with family and friends. And if his Paris home was an expression of his appetite for modernity—it epitomized his eclectic tastes, with mid-century cubist furniture by French sculptor Philippe Hiquily and 1980s acrylic pieces by Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata—the château it offered a retreat into the past.
Over the decades, Gastou gradually restored the building, often referring to the architect’s plans and a 1930s painting of the exterior of the house he discovered on the property. Working without a decorator, he hoped to keep the house as true to its origins as possible while also using it as a warehouse for his many and varied collections. As well as converting the adjoining stables into a four-bedroom guest house and installing a round pool on a sloping two-acre lot, his main concession to modernity was upgrading the kitchen, which is at the back of the house on the first floor, next to the dining room — and adding a bathroom on each of the four floors.
The most impressive of these is the basement bathroom, whose floors and walls are entirely clad in Vert d’Estours marble with white and green veins and Saint Anne des Pyrenees marble with white spots in an ode to Villa Kerylos, the famous turn – 20th century Greek Revival-style mansion on the French Riviera. Guests returning from the beach, a 25-minute walk from Gasto’s house, and wanting to freshen up he would be greeted by a large bronze statue of Apollo, perched on a plinth in one corner, and modeled after a Roman version in the British Museum. It was juxtaposed with a marble block and terrazzo chair by 1980s Memphis Group designer Ettore Sottsass, who oversaw its design Gastos gallery and whose radical, irreverent work that the marketer fondly likened to a punch in the face.
Gastos liked to express his love for the past, in part, by bringing it to life with the shock of the new. A decade of the 1960s in natural size mirror figure of the Italian artist Claudio Platania and the French fashion designer Pierre Cardin stood on one of the house’s naves, reflecting the corner carvings of the original pine balustrades. In the garden, a winged galvanized steel bench from the 1990s by British designer Tom Dixon contrasted sharply with the classic silhouettes of the pair of stone containers that flank the pool.
“The house is a cabinet of curiosities,” says Gastou’s son, Victor Gastou, who now runs his father’s gallery and owns the castle with his younger sister, Mathilde Dachdy-Gastou. As a teenager, instead of lounging by the pool, he would sit for hours in his father’s large, leather-covered walnut desk in the first-floor library and study the room’s myriad treasures. Located just outside the main entrance, next to a mound of pale gray stones that Gastou sometimes added after a trip to the beach, the library suggested the study of a gentleman of the grand tour era. Old photographs of rural scenes and local portraits, collected at local flea markets, hung in the pale yellow walls. A mid-19th-century gilt and bronze clock in the shape of a smiling devil sat on the desk, flanked by massive mid-century oak and iron shelves by French Art Deco designers André Arbus and Gilbert Poillerat. And lining the shelves, along with marble urns and antique leather-bound books, were items from Gasto’s collection of religious relics: crosses, fine votives, crowns of the Virgin Mary, and flaming pearl hearts.
Gastos’ bedroom, at the top of the castle turret, was similarly decorated with the rosaries, sacred hearts and shrines he collected throughout his life. Although he attended Mass as a child, he was spiritual rather than religious and was drawn to the talismanic properties of these objects. He collected used crosses from the nearby Bernardine convent whenever the sisters replaced their crosses, worn from years of prayer. “My father saved things the same way some people save animals,” says Victor. “Everyone told a different story. He was touched by the magic of their skating.”
Now almost completely emptied of its contents – which, along with art, objects and furniture from Gastou’s Quai Malaquais apartment, will go on sale at Sotheby’s in Paris on March 19 – the house is ready to begin another chapter . While Victor sees the auction as an opportunity to share his father’s story, giving his objects new life, he also wants to bring the castle into the 21st century. He plans to renovate the house and then vacation there with his own son, Cesar, who is now 7 months old. And although Victor’s own tastes are more minimalist than Yves’s, as he begins to think about making changes to the house, a phrase from his father, his motto for collecting, keeps echoing in his head: “When you open your eyes you, you can see beauty.”