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WHEN I WAS in my 20s and everyone liked classical houses, my home in Paris was a white cube,” recalls French decorator Jacques Garcia, now 69. “Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana on the walls. All my friends said, ‘What are you doing? How can you live like this?’ Forty years later, all my friends have made their fortunes, and now they want to live here.”

We are seated side by side in a snug, antiques-laden salon at Champ de Bataille, the 17th-century château in central Normandy (roughly 30 miles south of Rouen) that Garcia bought…