P aris, May 23, 2007: Carefully avoiding eye contact with the tourists in the street, Charlotte Gainsbourg quickly lets me into the small, graffiti-covered house at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil. Two blocks from Boulevard Saint-Germain in the Seventh Arrondissement, the house is where her father, Serge Gainsbourg, lived and, on March 2, 1991, died at the age of 62. In the days following his death, France went into mourning, fans crowded the tiny street singing his songs, and the women closest to him sat in his bedroom with his body for four days because Charlotte didn’t want to let him go. For 16 years this house has been shuttered and locked, with only the housekeeper or occasional family member allowed inside. Charlotte, an actress and a huge star in France, is now the owner of the house and wants, with the help of architect Jean Nouvel, to turn it into a museum. For the first time since Serge Gainsbourg’s death, she has agreed to reveal the private world of France’s most beloved and important songwriter.

Except for two pianos which have been removed, the house remains exactly the way it was on the day he died. The walls are covered with black fabric. The floor of the main drawing room is black and white marble. “Cluttered” is an understatement, but each thing is precisely in the place that Serge put it—and there are hundreds of things. Every surface is covered with ashtrays, photographs, and collections: toy monkeys, medals from various branches of the armed services, cameras, guns, bullets, police badges from all over France, pictures of the women who sang his songs—Brigitte Bardot, Anna Karina, Petula Clark, Juliette Gréco, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Marianne Faithfull, Françoise Hardy, Vanessa Paradis—and, most prominently, his lover of 13 years and Charlotte’s mother, the British actress Jane Birkin. There is a larger-than-life-size poster of international sex kitten Bardot, whom Serge first met on the set of a movie in 1959. Later, they carried on a clandestine affair while she was married to playboy Gunther Sachs, and recorded the steamy duet, written by Gainsbourg, “Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus.” Framed gold records—for albums featuring songs such as “La Javanaise,” “Ballade de Melody Nelson,” and “Love on the Beat”—are on the walls and the mantel above the fireplace. There is a bronze sculpture of a headless nude that Charlotte tells me was modeled on her mother, a statue of the Man with a Cabbage Head (the title of one of Gainsbourg’s greatest albums), Gainsbourg puppet dolls, tape recorders, a black lacquered bar with a cocktail shaker and glasses, a Jimi Hendrix cassette, framed newspaper stories, and empty red jewelry boxes from Cartier—”He loved the boxes,” says Charlotte. There are photos of Serge with Ray Charles, with Dirk Bogarde, with his last girlfriend, Bambou, and their son, Lulu. The small kitchen at the back of the first floor has a 15-inch black-and-white television set, candy bars and two cans of tomato juice in the refrigerator, opened wine bottles, and, in the cupboard, cans of food from 1991—except, says Charlotte, “the ones that exploded.”

Upstairs, on the second floor, in Serge’s skylit study, there is an IBM electric typewriter even though he never typed, books about Chopin, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Fra Angelico, and Velázquez, and a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Photos of Marilyn Monroe line the dark, narrow hallway, including one of the star dead, in the morgue. There is the room Jane Birkin called her “boudoir” and what Serge called “La Chambre de Poupée” (the doll room) after Jane left him, in 1980. The bathroom has a very low bathtub, modeled after one Serge saw in Salvador Dalí’s apartment, and bottles of Guerlain, Roger & Gallet colognes, and soap from Santa Maria Novella. His toothbrush is still there. The master bedroom has blackout curtains, a mirrored wall, and twin gold female heads with pearls around their necks at the foot of the black, mink-covered double bed. Chewing gum and mints are next to the bed, and on the bed are dried flowers that have been there since he died. In the large hallway closet: his white Repetto jazz shoes, ties, and pin-striped suits. The house is a shrine, but it’s not creepy, and one can imagine how stylish, even decadent this all must have seemed in 1970 when Serge and Jane moved into what was their family home and later would become the solitary lair of Gainsbourg—singer, songwriter, musician, painter, actor, director, smoker, alcoholic, romantic, ladies’ man, and revered national figure.

The second-floor hallway of Serge Gainsbourg’s house, at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil, 16 years after his death. Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

T he Carlyle Hotel, New York City, May 3, 2007: “He was a poet,” says Charlotte, 36, sitting on the floor of an enormous suite, talking in depth about her father for the first time since his death. She is wearing her usual outfit of jeans and T-shirt, is barefoot, and smokes a lot. “What he did was way ahead of its time. You can just read his lyrics—he plays with words in such a way that there are double meanings that don’t work out in English. He was just so very authentic. He was so shy, and very touching. And he was very generous. Every time I get into a taxi [in Paris] I hear a story about my father, because he used to take taxis all day long and [the drivers] tell me how sweet he was. One day a taxi driver told me my father had paid for his teeth to be mended; somebody else’s roof needed to be mended and he paid for that. He just had real relationships with people from the street. He was selfish in ways that artists can be, but there was no snobisme. He was always amazed at the fact that he had money. I remember going to lovely hotels with him and he was like . . . ‘Oooh, how fun this is.’ He had the eyes of a child.”

At home they listened to—among others—Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and Bob Dylan: “He told me to buy ‘Lay Lady Lay,’” says Charlotte (who now stars as Dylan’s wife in the Todd Haynes movie I’m Not There). He loved Cole Porter and Noël Coward. He embraced rock, saying he wanted to write in a modern context. He preferred the earthier voice of French singer Fréhel to the more showbizzy Edith Piaf. Classically trained, he was influenced by cabaret, modern jazz, African rhythms, Surrealist poetry, and reggae—all of which he utilized to elevate songwriting with his extraordinary body of work: more than 550 songs and 30 albums, numerous movie scores, countless TV commercials and Scopitones (short music films).