From the archive: the Parisian home of collector and By Terry founder Terry de Gunzburg (2020)

Ambroise Tezenas

"I’m a compulsive hoarder,” confesses Terry de Gunzburg. Nothing can quell the irrepressible delight this queen of cosmetics derives from hunting down vintage plates or ordering household linen.

The cupboards in her Paris home in the Auteuil neighbourhood - two houses combined, linked by a covered terrace and decorated by the interior designer Jacques Grange - are bursting with fine glasses and plates.

The room at the bottom of the garden where she stores furniture is also overflowing with nineteenth-century barbotine slipware and porcelain services (two hundred and fifty in all, she has counted them), made to commission or hunted down on her travels. Her passion for rare pieces has prompted her not only to rotate the furniture and objects in her living spaces, many of them from the gallerist Pierre Passebon, but also to open a cabinet of curiosities dedicated to the arts of the table, just a stone’s throw from her cosmetics and perfume boutique in the historic Galerie Véro-Dodat shopping arcade.

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Always on the move between Paris, London, and New York, this make up pioneer and founder of By Terry has a disconcerting ability to entertain with effortless ease and a sure touch, creating a mood that is warm and welcoming. Whether the occasion is a professional dinner for two hundred guests or a dîner à deux with her husband, she instinctively creates a setting that is elegant but never too studied or contrived. Cheerful and colorful, scattered with posies of flowers or herbs, or sometimes hand-painted ceramic fruits and vegetables, her table decorations are invariably quirky and unconventional. She will marry delicate tablecloths and precious eighteenth-century plates with “affordable glasses and candlesticks found in a clearance sale,” but dislikes and would never allow “novelty cutlery, even on an Indian boutis, plastic, or napkins that are too small.”

In the kitchen Terry often has help, for lack of time. But she is a foodie who loves nothing more than to snatch a moment to improvise mouthwatering dishes, perfumed and moistened with infusions of verbena or flavoured with China tea in place of broth. Her secret for relaxing the mood and encouraging conversation is to serve lots of appetisers of vegetables and fish, raw and cooked, as one big mezze to share, and a large selection of homemade cakes and ice cream for dessert.

'Be My Guest: At Home with the Tastemakers' by Pierre Sauvage (published by Flammarion) is out now