A graduate of the Ecole Camondo in Paris with a degree in interior architecture and design, ROBERT COUTURIER moved to New York in 1981. He quickly established his own practice, which has been recognized in, among other media, Architectural Digest’s prestigious annual list of the best decorators and architectural firms in the world. Since June 2012, Elle Decor has included Mr. Couturier in its A-List Top 60 Designers and British House & Garden has named him one of their Top 10 Foreign Decorators.
In 1987 while still relatively inexperienced, Mr. Couturier was entrusted by the financier Sir James Goldsmith with what would amount to the single greatest private commission of modern times: the re-conception, execution, and continuous embellishment - down to the last gilded detail - of Goldsmith’s 20,000-acre kingdom on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Crowned by a 60,000-square-foot vaulted-and-tile-domed hilltop palace called La Loma, the estate came to encompass vast satellite villas and assorted guest pavilions. He later completed the picture by decorating Goldsmith’s Boeing 757 (“a flying carpet with a motor”), his double-width Manhattan townhouse, and his historic French chateau.
Two and a half decades later, the New York-based Couturier continues to execute grand-scale commissions in the U.S., Europe, South America, and Russia. Today his name has become synonymous with continental and international style and elegance working with clients such as Anne Hearst and Jay McInerney, Cecile David Weill, Fred Iseman, Frederic Fekkai and Vanity Fair special correspondent Amy Fine Collins.