SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

ith work hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Palace of Versailles and the Moscow Kremlin, Régis Mathieu has forged an enviable reputation as a world-leading designer and restorer of chandeliers, yet visit his open workshop in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of southeastern France and it’s not just the beauty of his grand interior decoration that takes your breath away. A vintage car buff since childhood, he bought his first Volkswagen Beetle not long after his seventeenth birthday. Fast-forward thirty years to the present, and Mathieu has amassed a personal collection of more than twenty rare Porsches, including a 904 Carrera GTS, a 718 RSK, a 914/6 and a 356 B 1600 GS Carrera GTL Abarth. As you’d expect, a selection of rare 911s inhabit his personal playground, but for all their bells and whistles — perhaps unsurprisingly, cars wearing RUF, RS and Speedster emblems feature heavily — there’s an altogether simpler air-cooled classic fighting the pack to be noticed. Dressed in red and bought on nothing more than a whim during a journey home from the