Serge Gainsbourg’s Legendary House Is Basically a Time Capsule

Last month, one of Paris’s most famed addresses—the Left Bank home of songwriter Serge Gainsbourg and his lover, actress and singer Jane Birkin, who died in July—opened to the public as a house museum, Maison Gainsbourg.

The couple shared the house at 5 bis rue de Verneuil from 1969 (the same year they recorded their infamous song Je t’aime... moi non plus), until their split in 1980. Gainsbourg would live in the home until his death in 1991. But even before his passing, fans made the house a pilgrimage site, some leaving cabbage heads at the door (an homage to the name Gainsbourg gave himself, l’homme à tête de chou); others leaving graffiti tags on the facade. The house sat shuttered for more than three decades, until the couple’s daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who owns the home, decided to reopen it as a museum—and keep it exactly as it was when her parents lived there.

To visit today is to enter a time capsule, right down to the Gitanes cigarette butts left in the ashtray. Gainsbourg was a collector of pretty much anything bizarre, provocative, morbid, or artistic. Over the years, the house became a cabinet de curiosité, crammed with some 25,000 items, from ancient surgical tools to police badges to beautiful art (including Claude Lalanne’s L’Homme à tête de chou bronze sculpture) and antique furnishings. There are also large posters, portraits, and sculptures of his muses—the women he loved and wrote songs for— including Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Hardy, Vanessa Paradis, and, of course, Birkin. Amid all these items are Gainsbourg’s pianos and framed gold records.

Gainsbourg covered the walls and ceilings of the home in black, a color he felt reflected “la rigueur absolue.” That theme continues in a museum annex across the street designed by French ELLE DECOR A-List interior designer Jacques Garcia, which houses exhibition space, a bookshop, and a piano bar and café.

The entire experience is “a plunge into the intimate,” Charlotte said in a statement, adding, “I hope to offer the public an experience apart, which will perhaps give a new understanding to his work.”

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