For many the decoration was an occupation

François-Joseph Graf offices - in a Second Empire style germanopratin apartment - reflect his passion for the 19th century. A crazy charm emerges from these oak panelling hosting under 4.50 m of a ceiling decorated with clouds, a collection of furniture and tables for which a museum curator is damnerait. "I have the honesty to show what I like," he says to the address of those who honnissent the overloaded type. Our man is bulimic object, it meets the eye. Son of a Parisian antique dealer, he soon attended the beautiful homes and the exception, and su objects that he décorerait interiors.

François-Joseph Graf is today part of the small circle of Parisian decorators. Its customers are called David de Rothschild, Pierre Bergé, Claude Bébéar, Valentino. It has a high idea of his craft and packaged against those who ignore. "For many, the decoration was an occupation." That has been the family son who did not like his father so wished, or wife of goodwill who know choose the color of a fabric with taste. However, the decoration is works, as architecture. This is a drawing, a proportion, volumes. "The tone is given.

The eye is sometimes cruel

Former student of fine arts, architecture section, and a graduate of the école du Louvre, François-Joseph Graf began at the Palace of Versailles where he worked with Chief Curator, Pierre Verlet. "This great Mr authoritative about the royal furniture always told me to open the eyes." The eye of Graf is sometimes cruel. Nothing escapes his perfectionism. "It rarely uses the special weapon is our eyes". We all have equivalent potential. Except that look, this is also save and archive. "He works, he said, as an artisan, because he likes to be present at each stage of the work. At the Museum of Decorative Arts, where it has ensured the new layout of ten period-rooms - re-enactments in situ rooms with furniture or repeated the same - time, the Conservatives still have cold sweats! Expert in decor, it multiplied advice on spatial proportions, objects locations and intensities of light, colours and materials, to avoid the fault of taste or the historic contraflow.

The expression of period-room comes from American museums. Philadelphia, Boston and the Frick Collection, New York, inaugurated the principle of these sets reconstituted with fidelity of furniture and decorative elements. In Paris, the Museum Nissim Camondo offered an example of a private home reconstruction. For its reopening, the Museum of Decorative Arts had to offer to the public a chronological journey of the various French styles. Thus the Talairac show (1790) is a rare example of interior décor of the end of the Ancien Régime.

Always with Graf, magnificent dining 1900 designed by Georges Hoentschel reappears as it was at the universal exhibition. Idem for the library Office of Pierre Chareau in 1925. The apartment of the seamstress Jeanne Lanvin, decorated at the same time by Armand-Albert Rateau, is faithful to the original, the trinket closely. Blue silk of the walls has been hand-embroidered workshops Lesage to Madras (India), to render the details of the original curtain embroidered Cornély machine today disappeared.

The restoration work were funded on private funds in the amount of EUR 4.1 million. Knowledgeable amateur, Graf himself brought the money to the reconstruction of the dining room, very tarabiscotée of the Decorator Eugène Grasset dating from 1880.

Outside the period rooms, François-Joseph Graf has contributed to the creation of the woodwork show. A matter of pride. This room has recovered its impressive volumes, featuring three bays on the garden of the Tuileries. The result is up to his expectations, or almost. The requirement is the price that it is never totally satisfied in Graf. To the point that he delivers his best score in "so beautiful design department", part in which this Emeritus historicist did not intervene.

Museum of Decorative Arts, 107 street of Rivoli, 75001 Paris.