Book excerpt: Twenty-five world-class designers invite us inside their private French residences, providing intimate access to their creative universe and rich inspiration for home style. Stepping inside the private residences of France's leading tastemakers provides unrivaled inspiration for interiors with a personal flair. From a modernist retreat to an urban-pop apartment, and from an eclectic cabinet of curiosities to an eighteenth-century hôtel particulier, each ambiance demonstrates a perfect mastery of associations between color, pattern, volume, material, and decorative genius. Pierre Yovanovitch's elegant, purist sensitivity infuses his seventeenth-century château in Provence. Pierre Passebon, owner of the famous Galerie du Passage in Paris, has furnished his carefully curated home with a brilliant mix of tribal art, Wiener Werkstätte masterpieces, and design from the 1930s. Jewelry designer Lorenz Bäumer's own interior creations complement the resolutely contemporary pieces by modern masters such as Ingo Maurer, Ettore Sottsass, and Verner Panton in his light-filled, constantly evolving apartment. Fashion designer Gilles Dufour's eclectic collections include nineteenth-century history paintings, classical sculptures, and Christian Bérard drawings, displayed alongside a menagerie of sculptures by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. These private residences, each created by a world-class aesthete with a discerning eye, offer up a rich palette of inspired ideas for the home.