13 Facts About Emilio Terry

Emilio Rene Terry y Sanchez, known as Emilio Terry was a French architect, artist, interior decorator and landscape designer of Cuban-Irish ancestry.

Emilio Terry's paternal grandfather was sugar baron Tomas Terry, a Venezuelan-born Irishman known as the "Cuban Croesus", and his paternal grandmother was Teresa Dorticos y Gomez de Leys, a daughter of Andres Dorticos y Casson, the millionaire Governor of Cienfuegos, Cuba.

One of his uncles, Antonio Emilio Terry, married the American soprano Sybil Sanderson.

Emilio Terry owned a villa on the Cote d'Azur and a Paris apartment at 2, place du Palais-Bourbon.

Emilio Terry bought the Paris residence from Boni de Castellane in 1914.

On 24 June 1934, Emilio Terry bought from his brother-in-law Stanislas de Castellane the historic chateau de Rochecotte, near Langeais, famous for having belonged to Dorothee de Courlande, duchesse of Dino and received Talleyrand on frequent visits.

For 35 years, Emilio Terry restored this chateau and decorated it in the right period style.

Emilio Terry bequeathed Rochecotte to his great-nephew Count Henri de Castellane, but the family sold the estate in the early 1980s.

Emilio Terry was a close friend of Julien Green who disclose in his diaries that he was homosexual.

At once neoclassical and baroque, Emilio Terry designed houses, furniture, tapestries, objets d'art, gardens, and the interior decor of apartments and chateaux.

Emilio Terry launched an architectural style which he named the "style Louis XVII", an imaginary style freely inspired by historical examples such as Palladio or Claude Nicolas Ledoux.

In 1933, Emilio Terry realised a model of a double-spiral house, called "en colimacon", which illustrated one of his theories, that the art of architecture expressed a "dream to be realised".

Emilio Terry decorated each room in collaboration with Beistegui, designed a great deal of furniture, created an Italian-style theatre for artists of the Comedie-Francaise, designed a new park a l'anglaise, and added 18th-century-style follies to the grounds.