Ditto shopping for things to put in his houses. Louboutin has two warehouses—one outside of Paris, the other in Portugal. Both are heaving with furniture, carpets, flooring, doors, and art that he has picked up on his nonstop travels or at dealers and auctions. Like the kitchen’s immense blue doors, which he found in Egypt in the late 1990s, and the ornate stone fireplace façade, which came from Iran in 2009. You could call him a collector. Or you could call him a hoarder, albeit of the exotic and luxurious. What is certain is having so much stuff can be a challenge.
Take the kitchen floor here. It’s magnificent: An intricate geometric pattern made from black, off-white, gray, and brick-red marble, “from a palace in Damascus,” he said. He bought it at his friend Pierre Passebon’s Galerie du Passage, an art and antiques shop in the Galerie Véro-Dodat, a few doors down from Louboutin’s first boutique, which opened in 1991.
Louboutin knew he wanted to put the floor in the kitchen—“It would tell us what to do with the room,” he explained—so he went to the Paris warehouse to look for it. “We couldn’t find it,” he remembered. The tale conjures up the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the wood crate containing the Ark of the Covenant is reposited among thousands of similar containers in a US government storage facility. Bereft, Louboutin designed a parquet floor as a replacement. “And at the moment we were about to install it, the storage manager called and said they’d found the Syrian floor!”