Biography :
Emilio Rene Terry y Sánchez , known as Emilio Terry was a French architect, artist, interior decorator and landscape designer of Cuban-Irish ancestry. Creating furniture, tapestries and objets d'art, he was influenced by the château de Chenonceau, acquired by his family, and he created a style that was at once classical and baroque, which he called the "Louis XVII style".
Terry was born in Paris on September 13, 1890 to Francisco Terry y Dorticós, scion of a prominent Cuban family, Hispano-Irish in origin, that made its fortune in the sugar plantations. His mother, a great beauty, was the former Antonia Sánchez.[2] His paternal grandfather was sugar baron Tomás Terry, a Venezuelan-born Irishman known as the "Cuban Croesus", and his paternal grandmother was Teresa Dorticós y Gómez de Leys, a daughter of Andrés Dorticós y Casson, the millionaire Governor of Cienfuegos, Cuba. One of his uncles, Antonio Terry, married the American soprano Sybil Sanderson.
After 1897 Francisco Terry moved his family to New York City, where Antonia and her daughter, Natividad (later Countess Stanislas de Castellane), were painted in 1897 by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury. The family later moved to France, where Francisco Terry's brother José-Emilio—his son's namesake—had purchased Château de Chenonceaux in 1891.