Fred and Sarah bought our first house in Senlis on a whim, including all the furniture. A few years later, as the family grew, the need for more space became apparent. After discovering the rare pearl in the heart of the old medieval town, they came to ask me to remake the same house for them in an XXL version.
I had the rare opportunity to follow a construction site five minutes from my home and to know part of the history of this wonderful place. The 280 m2 were former stables attached to a mansion and sold in the 1960s to the artistic director of House and Garden. He had made it his second home and had asked the famous gardener, Russel Page, to design his park.
I came across a report in House and Garden showing this refined interior with some furniture by Fornasetti. The garden is one of the few remaining testimonies of the magic of Russell Page’s creations.
So are most of the homes in Senlis, rich in history, with characters as unusual as the walls that house their lives.
Fred and Sarah relied totally on me to renovate this weathered building with the sole intention of making it a warm nest for family and friends.
We kept the atmosphere informal but easy to live with, using materials that are resistant to the assaults of children, such as the Versailles parquet floor in waxed concrete, decorated the walls of the dining room with floral stencils, opened up the kitchen to make it flow more freely into the rest of the living room, created an entrance with antique doors that we found at a bargain sale, hid the big screen in the living room behind the curtains, and added a bathroom to the office so that it could be used as a guest room. On the first floor are the four bedrooms with three bathrooms and the linen room. On the landing is an office that overlooks the floor for working while keeping an eye on the children.
A lot of furniture and accessories were found in the flea markets in the area, objects of yesterday interacting with those of today in a heterogeneous mix full of life.
A new page for this house which tells its story so intimately linked to that of its successive inhabitants.