Hugo Décors

While Victor Hugo's house in Paris provides a striking glimpse of this in two rooms – the Chinese salon and Juliette Drouet's dining room – few people are truly aware of Victor Hugo's talent and commitment to interior design. This taste was mainly expressed in Guernsey during his exile from 1855 to 1870. First at Hauteville House, which was the only house he ever owned, the scene of Hugo's inexhaustible creativity in interior design, then at Hauteville II, where he created painted decorations on wood that were surprisingly fanciful and imaginative. These decorations and arrangements constitute a body of work in their own right in the writer's career, and contain the constants of his universe: shadow, light, darkness, illusion, reflections...

This book traces the history of each of the writer's homes, from Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to his last home on Avenue d'Eylau, showing, through the furniture and decorations preserved by the Maisons de Victor Hugo, how the writer was also a brilliant interior designer.