The Villa Majorelle

A welcoming Villa

To find out everything you need to know about the house and its history, you'll find information all along the the tour in french and english, as well as free tour applications (French / English / German). Would you like a guided tour? Come along on Saturday or Sunday at 11am.

The Villa's accessibility has been improved. A lift allows people with reduced mobility to discover the ground floor. A virtual tour, a tactile model and an application (with an LSF tour) are available. For the youngest visitors, a free booklet of games is available at the reception desk.
The house is fragile: to preserve its wooden floors, it is not possible to visit it in high-heeled shoes, and wearing overshoes is mandatory.

A renovated house

Under the guidance of heritage architect Camille André, restorers and specialists have undertaken a meticulous and respectful renovation of the building as it was when Louis Majorelle and his family inhabited it. The ground-floor reception rooms (dining room, lounge, terrace) and the bedroom on the first floor are open to visitors, not forgetting the exceptional staircase and its stained glass windows by Jacques Gruber.

The next phase of works, which will not require the house to be closed to the public, is scheduled for 2025-2026. It will involve recreating the bathroom and the wardrobe adjoining the bedroom, and creating educational areas on the first floor.

Nancy's first Art nouveau house

Designed by the architect Henri Sauvage and built around 1901-1902 for Louis Majorelle, the Villa Majorelle is an emblematic house of Nancy's Art nouveau style.

The Villa Majorelle occupies a very special place in the history of architecture. First entirely Art nouveau house in Nancy, it bears witness to a perfect collaboration between Parisian and Nancy-based artists. Alongside Henri Sauvage, we find the names of Jacques Gruber for the stained glass, Alexandre Bigot for the stonewares, Francis Jourdain and Henri Royer for the paintings, not forgetting Louis Majorelle himself for the ironwork, woodwork and furniture, and Lucien Weissenburger for the construction and site supervision.

Open to the public since 1997, the Villa Majorelle in both its exterior architecture and interior decoration strongly testifies to the notion of artistic unity advocated by the artists of the École de Nancy.

Artists and industrialists, the Majorelle family

The Majorelle family is a family of artists and industrialists from Nancy. Auguste Majorelle (1825 - 1879), Louis' father, was an earthenware decorator before extending his activity to wood decorations. His death led two of his sons, Louis (1859 - 1926) and Jules (1866 - 1934), to take over the family business with their mother. By the end of the century, the business was prospering: it was a great success at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The Majorelle workshops collaborated with the Daum manufacture to create lighting fixtures and since 1897 had been using ironwork to produce handles, locks and then handrails, architectural elements and lamp mounts. They opened numerous shops across France.

In 1885, Louis Majorelle married Jane Kretz (1864 - 1912). They had an only son, Jacques Majorelle (1886 - 1962) whose name will remain associated with painting and Morocco. The house that Louis Majorelle had built in Nancy, sometimes called Villa Jika in reference to Jane's initials, was therefore a family home. Louis Majorelle reserved a painting studio for himself on the second floor, which was well lit by a large bay window. However, the villa is also a house that showcases the work of the Majorelle workshops: the dining room published in the 1904 catalogue (Les blés, modèle riche) and the various views of the living room, reproduced several times, are good examples.