“Living in a house which does not suit you is like wearing some-one else’s clothes,” wrote Christian Dior in his autobiography Dior by Dior. Fortunately for his clients, in 1947— the same year he showed his visionary New Look collection—the Parisian couturier opened a boutique called Colifichets (French for “trinkets”) on the ground floor of his haute couture salons at 30 Avenue Montaigne that sold flowers, letter holders, and mirrors for dressing one’s home, alongside scarves and jewelry. Long before other maisons pivoted to homewares—a trend only accelerated by the hybrid work schedule many now follow post-pandemic—Dior’s décor offering expanded to include such varied objects as candlesticks, spice boxes, earthenware, incense burners, vases, frames, and garden lamps that might help make a woman’s home feel like a reflection of her personal aesthetic.
Dior’s founder intended Colifichets to feel like an 18th-century curio shop with a modern sensibility. His artist friend Christian Bérard proposed elegant toile de Jouy wallpaper and also suggested tucking monogrammed hatboxes on top of cupboards and in odd corners. “It was an inspiration,” wrote Dior. The seeming casualness brought the whole place to life.” And indeed, Dior’s belief that a home should be both “lived in, and livable in,” as he said of his own country house in Milly-la-Forêt, permeated each of the homes he decorated in the 1950s, from his Louis XVI townhouse in Paris’s 16th arrondissement to his Provençal chateau, La Colle Noire.
It’s that same mission that now drives Cordelia de Castellane, artistic director since 2013 of Dior’s homeware division, now known as Dior Maison. De Castellane, who is also the artistic director of Baby Dior, started her career in fashion at Chanel and Emanuel Ungaro, before launching a childrenswear line, CdeC, in 2006 and brings an intuitive touch to homewares. “Designing childrenswear collections was a natural choice for me, as I’m a mother of four,” she says. “I never planned to do decoration. I’ve always been creative and passionate about design and collecting homeware while decorating my house and so it just came naturally to me. Life is full of surprises.”
A cousin of Dior’s artistic director of jewelry, Victoire de Castellane, she is a consummate European aristo: Raised between Paris and Gstaad, her family name is that of one of France’s oldest dynasties, while her mother, interior decorator Atalanta de Castellane, is the daughter of a former Greek ambassador. Yet despite this posh upbringing, de Castellane’s interiors philosophy is refreshingly unpretentious. A cultivated yet homey spirit infuses each of her homes—a Saint-Germain-des- Près apartment, a country house 45 minutes north of Paris, and a Swiss chalet—that she shares with her husband and children.
Whether entertaining or for every-day meals, seasonal flowers like roses, peonies, and dahlias are de Castellane’s centerpiece. “I love all of my flowers, and all of them are my guests of honor,” she says. De Castellane’s personal glassware collection includes hand-engraved fern-pattern water glasses she designed for Dior Maison, Bohemian crystal, Murano tumblers, family heirlooms, and flea market finds—and she loves mixing all of them together. To keep everything from looking too refined and meticulous, she has been known to lay a table with textiles she picked up on holiday in Madagascar or her grandmother’s old sheets. She loves dying and hand painting vintage tablecloths, which sometimes form the basis for new patterns in her Dior Maison collections.
Another thing de Castellane has scored from flea markets: an extensive collection of vintage Dior dishes including her favorite Ginori plates from the 1970s, a Porte-bonheur design featuring a star made of flowers, and a lily of the valley pattern comprising sprigs of the lucky charm the maison’s founder often carried in his pocket or wore pinned to the lapel of his jacket. She intends for her Dior Maison pieces to be future heirlooms, and many of her designs—like her own lily of the valley pattern rendered in a toile de Jouy style—riff on such gris-gris beloved by Dior’s founder.
For her Spring/Summer 2025 Les Gris-Gris de Monsieur Dior collection inspired by La Colle Noire, de Castellane designed four services, each highlighting one of Dior’s talismans through pieces like plates, tea and coffee sets, a tray, and a trinket bowl. For breakfast, there’s a blue star pattern like the heavenly body Dior spotted in 1946 en route to a meeting with his future financial backer and which features prominently on lampshades, armchairs, and moldings in his chateau. For lunch, there’s a green four-leaf clover design like the universal emblem of good fortune Dior always kept within reach, and which one might find on the verdant grounds. For tea, there’s a pink rose motif taking cues from the charming blooms that adorn walls and folding screens in his summer salon and perfume his garden. And for dinner, there’s a yellow bee design inspired by the beehive printed wallpaper and duvet in Dior’s sister Catherine’s bedroom.
Another prominent motif in de Castellane’s Dior Maison collections is cannage, the signature stitching seen on many of Dior’s leather goods, which borrows the geometrical pattern of squares and diagonals from the caned back Napoleon III chairs Dior kept in his couture salons. Her Le Noël de Monsieur Dior line highlights a Limoges dinner service with a mesh of 24-carat gold subtly matched with festive red, green, or blue, complemented by elegant glass candleholders, embroidered napkins, crystal glassware, bespoke tablecloths, and hand-painted vases. “This season, I will spend the holidays in the mountains,” says de Castellane. “My table will have a mix of vintage pieces and local pieces, with my Dior Maison Cannage red plates from Le Noël de Monsieur Dior collection.” Sounds ever so cozy.
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