Despite the pared-back feel of the overall design, the château is studded with eclectic touches. In the living room, pieces from different countries and centuries are put into dialogue with one another: Custom-made linen sofas rub shoulders with a Swedish Grace oak banquette, and a period stucco fireplace complements one of Francesco Clemente’s jigsaw-like watercolors. It’s an unexpected mix, but it makes the place feel lived-in and real. With every nook and cranny curated down to the smallest detail, was Yovanovitch worried his house would end up looking like a showroom? “Non, non, not at all,” he says. “It’s a happy house with all my favorite things in it, a place that lives and gets messy from time to time. We like to cook and eat, sometimes we dance. It reflects my personality more than anything else.”
Château de Fabrègues wouldn’t be the home it is without Yovanovitch’s contemporary art collection. Inside are pieces by American sculptor Richard Nonas and Franco-Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming, while the garden is host to an Alicja Kwade installation inspired by the planetary system. The work he’s perhaps fondest of is a Claire Tabouret fresco, which covers the entire château chapel and took a month to complete. “When you walk inside the chapel, you have this mural with 85 children looking directly at you, it’s very powerful,” he says.
What makes Château de Fabrègues different from Yovanovitch’s other projects is that it will never be fully completed. Whereas client commissions are typically wrapped up the moment keys are handed over, designing his own home is an ongoing process. With no timelines or cut-off dates, he says it’s impossible to draw a line under the vast project—particularly when you’re a perfectionist. “I want to change things all the time, repaint a room or move furniture around,” he explains. “I have sleepless nights where I think about the space, the light and where a particular chair should sit. I already had that as a teenager: I wouldn’t be able to sleep unless the furniture around me in my bedroom was arranged right. I’ve always been obsessed with beauty surrounding me.” As an autodidact with a keen interest in the arts but no formal design education, he follows his intuition rather than movements or trends. “I think I’m freer to do what I want than most qualified designers,” he says. He believes that he owes much of his style to this greater sense of freedom. Steering away from flashy pretensions, Yovanovitch’s specialty lies in crafting harmonious volumes smoothed by soft lines and natural materials.
If there’s one thing that has changed in his practice over the years, it’s the use of color. He has moved on from the white minimalism of his early days. At Château de Fabrègues, the largely neutral palette is punctuated with playful accents of yellow, petrol blue and brown to underline the architectural scale. True to his made-to-measure approach, he creates custom tints for each project, never buying ready-mixed paint. “I’m a child of the South after all,” he says with a smile. “We like light, color and fun. I’ve come to realize that adding pops of color helps to make the architecture more interesting, rather than distracting from it.” In his 2019 redesign of the Villa Noailles gift shop, it seems as though he has reconnected with his Southern French roots more than ever before. Located on the Côte d’Azur in a Robert Mallet-Stevens–designed building, the art center’s boutique now features peachy orange ceilings and a mix of sunshine yellow, turquoise and terra-cotta red walls, purposefully clashing with splashes of electric blue in stark contrast to the white cubist exterior.
Be it in the form of bold color accents or eclectic furniture pairings, moments of drama have become more frequent in Yovanovitch’s recent work. His tendency to at times dramatize interiors is a nod to his passion for opera and set design, which he cites as major inspirations. “Opera sets are at their most powerful when they reflect the soul of the work, its music and characters,” he explains. “I want to do the same in my oeuv-re. With each space, I want to tell a new story—a story that fits my client and the locale.”
Fittingly, Yovanovitch has recently landed a commission to design the set for a production of Verdi’s 1851 opera Rigoletto in Basel: “It’s a dream come true,” he says. “I’ve always been a firm believer that if you really want something, then one day you’ll get it.” As one would expect, Yovanovitch is planning on a design that respects the soul of the oeuvre, while making it relevant for 21st-century audiences. In this way, it’s not unlike what he did at Château de Fabrègues: combining the ancient and the modern to craft a work of timeless beauty.
