French luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault pledges $166 Million to Frank Gehry-designed new museum in Paris, he announced his new deal at a meeting on March 8, 2017. The new museum, renamed as La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimonie, will be added to Arnault's Museum Empire list, which will be very close to Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton-opened in 2014.

The Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions (ATP) was a museum of ethnology, which exposed the French rural and artisan society of the nineteenth century until 1960. In the absence of visitors, it closed its doors in 2005 and its collections integrate the MUCEM in Marseille. 

La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimonie. Image courtesy of LVMH / Frank Gehry

The City of Paris had conceded the use of the building to the State by an agreement signed for thirty years in 1954, renewed once until 2014. The site being classified, the building could not be sold and the nature of the museum- could not be changed either. Bernard Arnault, whose Vuitton neighboring the ATP exceeded expectations of attendance (he planned to attract 600,000 visitors, the million visitors were reached), wanted to find a solution for the building for a long time. 

The City of Paris has just given it the green light for a concession of fifty years, on the same model as the Vuitton Foundation. LVMH Arts-Talents-Patrimoine is in line with the Institute of the trades of excellence that the LVMH group has created. It will host a venue for events, exhibitions, artistic workshops, an academy of crafts and crafts, a documentation center and an institute of excellence. 

La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimonie. Image courtesy of LVMH / Frank Gehry

The project is aimed at a large and young public, young, to make him discover these professions. There is also a restaurant on the eighth and top floor. Bernard Arnault again called on Frank Gehry to rehabilitate the building, which will receive a light-colored glass cladding. At the press conference on March 8, he said he was delighted "to make a new project with Gehry who is always full of ideas.''

He described his project as a ''new cultural and philanthropic start-up.'' The amount of work financed by LVMH is estimated at €158 Million ($166 Million). LVMH will have to pay an annual fee of €150.000 euros to the Paris City Hall, to which will be added a ticket, concert, restaurant and merchandise fees. € 10 million has been allocated to LVMH to do basic construction work, including asbestos removal. 

La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimonie. Image courtesy of LVMH / Frank Gehry

The project will be submitted to the Paris Council at the end of March and will have to be approved by the Site Commission of the Ministry of the Environment because of its proximity to the Bois de Boulogne. Bernard Arnault expressed the wish ''that the project will be completed sooner than the Vuitton Foundation, which took ten years to come.''

Renovations are expected to be complete within five years and the new museum is expected to open in 2022.

Top image: The former Arts and people’s traditions’ museum, located in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, will become a showcase for handicraft and art works, under the supervision of French group LVMH. Image © Christophe Petit Tesson/AFP/Getty Images.

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