This Embroidery Maven’s Indian Apartment Is a Tapestry of History

The scion of the legendary couture embroidery family loves the chaos.

This article originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of ELLE DECOR. For more stories from our archive, subscribe to ELLE DECOR All Access.

Jean-François Lesage used to live above the embroidery workshop he runs in an Arts and Crafts–style house in Chennai, India. As the business grew, however, space became an issue. “One day, I found myself with craftsmen embroidering just outside my bedroom door,” he recalls. “I figured it was time to move before they ended up working on my bed!”

The spacious apartment he discovered, in a nearby area called Poes Garden, is on the top floor of a 1980s Art Deco-style building that stands out for its grand entry hall. The building’s slightly idiosyncratic designer was an engineer and astrophysicist named Basu John, whose widow still lives across the hallway from Lesage. “There are lots of square feet that serve no purpose and rooms with strange angles,” he says.

Lesage’s unit has a triangular dining area and an immense kitchen. There are also countless balconies, a central courtyard open to the elements, and a staircase that leads from the mezzanine overlooking the living room to a roof terrace. “With all the air circulating, it feels almost like living in a ship that’s run aground,” he jokes.

Lesage comes from a family with beads and gold thread in their blood. They have been embroiderers since the 1860s, and his late father, François, was a legend in the fashion world who worked on couture collections for everyone from Coco Chanel and Cristóbal Balenciaga to Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld.

His own commissions have been no less distinguished. They include the restoration of Louis XV’s crown for the Louvre and a set of red-and-gold curtains for the presidential palace in Delhi. Lesage’s specialty, however, is creating embroideries for interiors, and he has collaborated with top French designers including François-Joseph Graf and Jacques Grange. “His work is unbelievably luxurious,” declares another client, Jean-Louis Deniot. Adds the ELLE DECOR A-List Titan Robert Couturier, “The sense of creativity and level of sophistication Jean-François brings to his work is really quite exceptional.”

Lesage, who grew up in Versailles, first visited India at the age of 19 and immediately felt like a fish in water. “I’m much more at home in societies where there’s a certain sense of chaos,” he explains. With his business associate Patrick Sav­ouret, Lesage settled in Chennai in 1993, after discovering an age-old community of embroiderers in the nearby town of Sriperumbudur. Today, 200 of them are under his employment. And while he’s clearly found an extraordinary talent pool to craft the yards of embroidery for his business, it’s the locals themselves who make these fineries come to life.

In many ways, his apartment is in complete contrast to the aesthetic of the region, with its abundance of bright, candy-color temples. His walls are mainly white, and the floors are a dark green slate from Rajasthan. There is also a certain sobriety in the choice of objects. “It’s very soothing,” he explains. “When you’re surrounded by vivid hues all the time, and it’s so hot, you don’t want to be stifled by an overabundance of things.”

The majority of the furnishings he surrounds himself with were acquired in India. He avows a love of portraits, collects votive temple lamps from the 17th to 19th centuries, and has a host of statuettes offered as fertility gifts at religious festivals.

Many acquisitions have interesting stories attached. An armchair in the living room originally belonged to the Madras high court, which transported itself to the mountains during the sweltering summer months. “It has screws everywhere so it can be completely dismantled,” he points out. Nearby are a pair of terra-cotta temple statues, bought from a well-born antiques dealer who resisted social pressures to open her own gallery, since it is taboo in the state of Tamil Nadu for women from important families to have careers.

Even embroidery is kept to a minimum here. Exceptions include a few prototypes still on their looms, the curtains in the dining room edged with a Louis XV motif, and an assortment of trompe l’oeil animal-skin rugs sewn with wool thread. “I like little poetic nods to the British Raj,” he says.

Perhaps another gesture that harkens to those earlier times is his open-door policy at home. “I’ve never had keys to any of my homes in India,” he says. “One of the luxuries of living here is you can have full-time staff, so you don’t need to worry about security.” Often, Lesage will come home to find his neighbor from across the hall in his sitting room. “When we leave both our flats open, it forms a huge space filled with beautiful things,” he says. “She feels at home at my place, just as I do in hers. It really is such an agreeable way of life!”

This story originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE

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