A Rothko burns quietly above the fireplace. An Alexander Calder shifts in the draft, unhurried, the way a thought revises itself before it becomes a sentence. In the dining room, Francis Bacon's Studies from the Human Body: A Triptych fills an entire wall, bodies suspended in that urgent orange ground he loved, sealed and alive at once, while below them, at the Jacques Adnet table, the family has eaten its tagliatelle on ordinary evenings, in that easy proximity to the extraordinary that only a certain kind of life makes possible. The Jean Dunand console across the room is lacquered in an orange that answers the Bacon as though the two had always intended to be in conversation, which they had, in the sense that everything in this apartment was placed with the deliberateness of someone who understands that a room, like a sentence, succeeds or fails by what it puts next to what. A Marc du Plantier sofa anchors the living room, where a Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann carpet lies underfoot; Ruhlmann's dining chairs, made in cherry wood and rush, first shown at his celebrated Rendez-vous des Pêcheurs de Truites stand at the 1932 Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in Paris, occupy the space beneath the Bacon with the quiet authority of things that were made for exactly this kind of room. The palette runs to burnt orange, plum, turquoise, navy, lime green, colours that in other hands would quarrel, but here hold together with the conviction of a chord. Jacques Grange, who helped compose the whole, called Terry de Gunzburg "an extraordinary colourist" and said of the apartment's spirit: "I didn't want to touch it." The building is a prewar Upper East Side midrise, discreet and elegant, with high ceilings and the generous proportions of an era that still believed in space. Inside, New York gives way entirely to Paris, and to a sensibility that took forty years and five homes to fully arrive at itself.
On April 22, 2026, Sotheby's New York will disperse approximately 125 lots from this apartment in what the house describes as the most valuable single-owner design sale in its history, estimated at 30 to 44 million dollars. The works will be presented in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, Marcel Breuer's 1966 raw concrete fortress, which has in its time held the Whitney Museum, the Met Breuer, and now Sotheby's, and which wears its own history the way certain people wear age: with complete indifference to anything but its own integrity.
Terry de Gunzburg spent fifteen years at Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, several as Creative Director, her eye sharpened daily by Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, men for whom a photograph was a form of pressure, applied to the world until it yielded its secret. In 1992, she invented Touche Éclat: a luminizing pen that became one of the best-selling beauty products in the world and changed, permanently and without announcement, the language of skin. In 1998, she founded By Terry. Her husband, Jean, is a molecular and cellular biologist trained at the Institut Pasteur and the Whitehead Institute, a man whose professional life is a sustained act of reading existence at the level of the invisible. One measures beauty in micrograms. The other reads life in molecules. Over four decades, across five homes, these two built a collection whose coherence astonishes: the kind of interior that makes you feel, standing inside it, that beauty has a logic, and that someone here has understood it completely. They described themselves as "more amateurs than collectors." Every acquisition, they said, began as a coup de foudre, a lightning strike, a certainty that arrived before any reasoning could.
The crown of the April sale is an ensemble of fifteen mirrors by Claude Lalanne, created between 1974 and 1985 for the Salon de Musique of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé's apartment on the Rue de Babylone in Paris. Estimate: 10 to 15 million dollars, though to approach them through that number alone is to enter a cathedral through the gift shop.
Lalanne, the sculptor who gave apples mouths, set cabbages on legs, cast entire afternoons of light in galvanised copper, came into Saint Laurent's world through her husband François-Xavier, who had been commissioned to make a Chinese dragon in a stovepipe for the Dior boutique on Avenue Montaigne. Saint Laurent was then still a young designer at the house. He met the Lalannes. He never looked away. For Saint Laurent's own autumn/winter 1969 haute couture collection, Lalanne made plaster moulds of model Veruschka's body, bust, torso, and belly, and had them cast in galvanised copper. Two gowns received these breastplates: one Mediterranean blue, one black, body-as-armour over diaphanous chiffon, a pairing that remains among the most startling conjunctions in the entire history of dress. Saint Laurent wrote of her: "Her beautiful sculptor's hands seem to push back the mists of mystery in order to reach the shores of art."
The first two mirrors arrived on the music room wall in 1974. Others followed across the next eleven years, each one an accretion, organic and inevitable, until fifteen bronze frames, copper leaves and linden tendrils extending from their edges as though a single summer had been frozen mid-exhale, covered an entire wall of the Salon de Musique. Saint Laurent had said, more than once, that a room without mirrors is a dead room. Lit by candlelight, the completed installation returned its inhabitants to themselves, softened, refracted, and edged with something almost mythological. When the Saint Laurent–Bergé collection came to Christie's Paris in 2009, the mirrors sold for 900,000 euros, setting the record for Les Lalanne at auction. Terry de Gunzburg, who had known Saint Laurent personally, who had lived inside his aesthetic vocabulary for years, acquired them. They return now, seventeen years later, with an estimate exceeding seventeen times that figure, and carrying in their bronze leaves the memory of every evening they ever reflected.
The remainder of the design sale is a private atlas of French form at its most fully inhabited. André Groult's shagreen cabinet from around 1926, shagreen being ray skin, ancient and dyed, sanded into something between leather and light, is estimated at 600,000 to 800,000 dollars. Jean Royère's Ours Polaire sofa and matching armchairs from circa 1950, their deep white pile breathing like something alive, are each estimated in the same range. Royère, a Parisian banker who became a designer, furnished the palaces of King Farouk, King Hussein of Jordan, and the Shah of Iran before retiring in 1972 and dying in New York in 1981, was brought back to general awareness through a 1999 retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and a 2008 show at Sonnabend Gallery. He worked with comfort the way a poet works with line breaks: as a vehicle for something that has no other name. Alexandre Noll's mahogany cabinets from around 1946, raw, organic, closer to forest than furniture, stand at 700,000 to one million. Works by Jean-Michel Frank, Paul Dupré-Lafon, Jean Dunand, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and Armand-Albert Rateau complete a sale that, read as a list of names, sounds like a poem about everything the 20th century managed, briefly, to get right.
The modern and contemporary works, a Rothko, an Agnes Martin, a Robert Ryman, a Picasso, a Klee, will follow in Sotheby's New York evening sales in May. Rothko's Untitled (1969), painted in the penultimate year of his life during the Rothko Chapel commission in Houston, and later included in a 1996–97 exhibition at the Menil Collection revisiting that body of work, carries an estimate of 10 to 15 million dollars. Martin's Untitled #6 (1977), geometry as the closest painting has ever come to silence, is estimated at 3 to 4 million. Ryman's Versions III (1992), a painting whose subject is white and all the distances that live inside it, at 2.5 to 3.5 million.
Terry de Gunzburg is seventy. She wants her children to have the freedom to build their own collections, to be struck by their own lightning, her words, unembellished. The proceeds will go toward cultural, educational, and scientific causes. She is giving back, with interest, what four decades of living with beautiful things gave her.
The collection will be on view at the Breuer building from April 10 to 21, 2026. The auction follows on April 22.
Afterwards, the objects will go their separate ways, into new rooms, new light, new hands. The fifteen mirrors of the Rue de Babylone have already held Saint Laurent's reflection, Bergé's, Terry de Gunzburg's; they have been present at evenings that will never be written down, have returned to their owners an image of themselves on nights of great joy and on ordinary Tuesdays alike. An object that has lived that kind of life carries it forward. The next room that receives these mirrors will inherit something it cannot name, will only feel, perhaps on certain evenings, a quality in the light that seems to come from somewhere deeper than the wall.
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