At Home Palm Beach Gardens Opening Date

Jacques Grange celebrates his 74th birthday next month, but take note: He's no lion in winter. "There is no wrinkle in my work. I'm like a good wine," laughs the silver-tressed French interior decorator, whose Instagram handle—to take the vintage metaphor one step further—happens to be @beaujolais1944. "The more it ages," he continues, "the better it is."

Case in point? A rambling, Depression-era stucco villa in Palm Beach that's absolute olé!—barrel tiles, cinquefoil arched windows, wrought-iron balconies, coats of arms both carved and painted, and polychrome tiles that were sourced on trips to Seville and Barcelona. Architects John L. Volk and Gustav Maass conjured it up for two rich, young Chicago snowbirds, Florence and Harry Thomas, a restaurant heiress and a stockbroker. Volk was especially proud of what he called the three-story project's "very livable interior, not like so many of the Spanish houses built in that era that have now been either torn down or altered."

The near-century of decors that followed the house's completion in 1930, though, tended to be stiffly thematic. This time around, Grange whipped up a light-handed, dégagé makeover that complements Volk and Maass's mint-condition floor plan for La Loma (Spanish for "the hill" because it crowns an artificial mound), a.k.a. Casa Tía Flora (the name used by the Thomases). And in some cases he amplified and improved on it while respecting, without hesitation, its Hispano-Moorish architecture. "The balance between the two spirits is happy and comfortable, not traditional, and very reflective of the owner's taste," Grange says, adding, after a moment's thought, "No, not taste, because he doesn't have taste—he has style."

As La Loma's current owner, an American investor who has long lived in England and France, recalls, "I did pretty well early on in my career, but I knew that when I had some money my taste would have to evolve and be trained. Back in the 1980s, Didier Aaron, a Paris antiques dealer who was definitely a grand monsieur, told me about Jacques, who was working for him at the time, and said, 'This man will become the most important decorator since Madeleine Castaing and Henri Samuel.' So I went to see Jacques, and he has helped me ever since. I don't buy any property without reviewing it with him," the latest one being La Loma, though a London house is nearly complete, and a Wyoming retreat, new from the ground up, is under discussion. "We saw five ugly houses, and this was the only nice one," Grange explains of La Loma. "The garden is magic, too."

Centered on a grand banyan tree that spreads its baroque branches among red and orange bougainvilleas, cycads, camellias, and other subtropical species, the walled garden (created for the previous owner by Mario Nievera and Keith Williams of Nievera Williams) seems to flow inside. Foliage prints in rich greens creep indoors like errant vines: fig-leaf upholstery in the living room, cactus-motif curtains in the master suite, shingle-plant leaves on the breakfast-room cushions. In the living room, succulent plants, butterflies, fish, and a praying mantis are woven into a 1950s tapestry screen (divided in two for the occasion) by French artist Jean Lurçat. "I love Lurçat, but nobody knows him!" exclaims Grange, who also placed a Marina Karella hibiscus-flower cocktail table in the same room. "She created a lot of flower furniture in the 1970s, and Pierre [Passebon, the adventuresome Paris gallerist who is Grange's life partner and design accomplice] rediscovered her."

Inside Jacques Grange's latest project. "A New Leaf," page 94. Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo. Styled by Mke Ten Have.

There's plenty of wicker as well, in homage to style queen Marella Agnelli. Pedestal tables stand atop slender bases shaped like tree trunks. Spiky ceramic lamps and vessels—some by Bela Silva, a Portuguese artist championed by Grange and Passebon—bring seed pods to mind. Dragonflies flit across the fabric deployed on chairs in a second-floor space that decorator and client call the "Sinatra bar" because of its Rat Pack–in–Palm Springs vibe. The renovated pool cabana, on the other hand, reminds the owner of those at Antibes' chic Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc.

The decor doesn't feel important," Grange says. "It feels dégagé—relaxed and easy.

Grange raised some of La Loma's ceilings, as much as five feet in places, and punched through new but sympathetic windows, modeling several after Volk and Maass's five-lobe originals. Exterior doors were also raised and widened. Now there's not only more light but more landscape on view. The master bath, lavished with flamboyant antique tiles—some of them form towering cypress trees; others are glazed with tulips—was left intact.

"Don't touch the bathroom," the decorator recalls telling the owner. "It's magique, so Doris Duke!" The client instantly agreed, adding that he's always been a historicist at heart. Counters Grange, with a joking grin, "We work together like ping-pong, and I win all the time."