By Emma Bird
There’s an immediate sense of drama as you walk into the airy double-vaulted Manhattan apartment where celebrated French painter Françoise Gilot lived and worked for almost 30 years. With the atmosphere of a stage set from a bygone era, it feels as if the leading lady has only just exited the scene.
Now listed at $4.3mn, the three-bedroom duplex (pictured above) at 27 West 67th Street was bought by Gilot in 1990. She moved there in 1995, following the death of her second husband, polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk.
The building, designed in 1902 as part of the West 67th Street Artists’ Colony Historic District, was conceived by painters for painters. With original oak parquet floors and a 17-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling, the studio forms the heart of the apartment. Tall north-facing windows flood the space with indirect light. A mezzanine walkway, which allowed Gilot to step back and view her canvases from above, was a feature typical of these buildings. Although not included in the sale, her easel is still in place, along with her apron, palette and a rolling case of paints.
“It’s rare to find a home that so seamlessly reflects its owner,” says Leslie Hirsch, founder of the trusts and estates division at Christie’s International Real Estate Group. “The elegance of the space, and the creative possibility it contains, is powerful in its simplicity.”
The building, part of a block that attracted I ♥️NY logo designer Milton Glaser, dancer Isadora Duncan, playwright Noël Coward and painter Norman Rockwell among others, remains steeped in creative history. The hand-cranked caged elevator is still operated by a doorman, and antique fire axes and brass hooks line the stairwell walls.
The duplex’s lower level includes a vaulted dining room, a galley kitchen and a den with fireplace and built-in bookcases. Upstairs are two en suite bedrooms with walk-in wardrobes and a small study. South-facing windows looking on to a canopy of trees provide greater privacy in spring and summer. Gilot also owned a two-bedroom guest apartment in the building, currently on the market for $2.5mn.
Along with the other residents she also enjoyed access to a communal roof terrace, where she often dined and relaxed in the sun, while taking in the views over Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.
Gilot first visited the building in the 1960s, attending a party. According to her daughter, Aurélia Engel, whose father was the French painter Luc Simon, she was immediately enchanted. “She said to herself, ‘One day, I’ll live here,’” Engel recalls. Years later, while living in California, her son Claude spotted a studio for sale and she didn’t hesitate to act.
By then, she knew exactly what she did and didn’t want in a home. In 1943, as a 21-year-old painter in occupied Paris, Gilot met Pablo Picasso. During the decade they were together, they spent time in Vallauris, in the south of France, where their children Claude and Paloma were born. Their modest villa, la Galloise was often a place of tension and she painted it with detachment.
Later, in La Jolla, she and Salk made their home in a modernist house perched above the Pacific. Built in the late 1960s, it featured open interiors, glass walls, and a layout that blurred the boundary between inside and out. It offered long ocean views, bright light and air.
But it was in New York that Gilot stayed the longest. In the Artists’ Colony, she painted daily, producing, among other works, “Intuitive Convergence”, a large canvas that currently hangs above the fireplace. Unlike the homes in Vallauris or La Jolla, this space was wholly her own.
The apartment has drawn interest from collectors, politically engaged buyers and creatives alike — people with an eye for history wanting a home that inspires. “It’s not a cookie-cutter apartment,” says Hirsch. “Every inch of this space breathes with the brilliance and boldness of a woman who lived life on her own terms.” The result is not simply an apartment, but the most personal self-portrait Gilot ever made.
Photography: Christie’s International Real Estate; AFP/Getty Images
