Architectural Digest – Feb 1987
An Englishman’s House in France
Guest Speaker: Dirk Bogarde
THE HOUSE WAS BUILT as a shepherd’s house in 1641 and added to in three sections as the family, and their fortunes, grew. When I first saw it sixteen years ago it was a solid, uncompromising stone-built house under a long tiled roof, three stories high, sitting fair and square to the winds on an abandoned terraced hillside.
The first floor sat directly on the earth without damp course or foundations; it still has neither and seems none the worse for that. When a boulder was discovered which was too big to be moved it was merely incorporated into the walls, all of which are at least a meter thick; perhaps these act as a sort of anchor?
The stout oak door opened directly into the kitchen (the earliest part of the house), which had an immense open fireplace with a canopy and a hand-hewn stone sink in one corner. Through a rough wooden door one went down two steps into an adjoining cow stall which had held eight beasts and a rusty manger; next to that a plank door led down four steps into a cart shed in which a battered Citroën sat in the dust. All the floors were thus on different levels, but all the ceilings were uniform, supported by giant oak beams heavily stained black.
The kitchen wall was roughly washed in thick khaki distemper; the cow stall was built of uncut fieldstone and so was the cart shed; cobwebs and dust were everywhere. ln the kitchen the floor was covered with octagonal honey-colored tiles, the cow stall with cracked concrete, the cart shed with old bricks laid directly on the earth. They are still there to this day.
When I stood in the cart shed and looked up through the two doorways toward the kitchen area, I knew that I had the basis for my longed-for all- white long room. It would be at least twenty feet wide by fifty feet long once a little architectural work had been done. This was entrusted to my brave architect, Leon Loschetter, who understood exactly what l wanted and was very relieved that I did not wish acres of white wrought iron, plate glass and parquet flooring, or swimming pools.
I insisted that the character of the house, both inside and out, must be retained at all costs, and that only the most ancient materials should be used in the reconstruction. We would open the three rooms into one by cutting wide arches in the thick walls, off-set so that the disagreeable effect of sitting in a tunnel would be avoided. The room must be one unit, but with three distinct sitting areas linked together by the massive beams above and the tiled floors below. The kitchen would remain intact, canopy, fireplace, stone sink and all; the great cart-shed doors were to become a window and a door combined; and the sagging door of the cow stall, giving directly onto the land, would also become a window with a deep window seat.
All windows faced south to catch every scrap of light, winter and summer; the hideous black-stained’beams were stripped, sanded roughly and then rag-washed white. Walls were all plastered with an uneven surface and a coarse-textured finish, as in all old houses which have been built by peasant hands. The floors, except for the kitchen and the cart-shed bricks, would be laid with ancient tiles removed from a demolished farm in the valley. The kitchen, with its canopied fireplace, was to be the focal point of the room.
Work started in early April and was, amazingly, finished in July while I was working abroad. The finished room, when I first saw it that July, was exactly as I had hoped and planned it to be, so much so that I chairs and sofas, in their frilly English chintzes, when they arrived to be unloaded, because they completely broke the white simplicity and perfect proportions. The chairs and the sofas were re-covered in a thick white woven cotton instantly. And everything brought over from England fit in perfectly. This had all been planned months before, so each piece went into position with ease.
The room is a sitting room: that is to say, it is a room where people can sit, sprawl, read books, make conversation, listen to music, argue, knit or relax in whatever way they wish. The paintings are all modern: Joan Eardley, Christopher Wood, Leonard Rosoman, a Ben Nicholson which I particularly enjoy, two Monnerets and a Picasso lithograph. They look, on the white walls with space all round them, like windows opening out to fantastic landscapes. It is a “summer room” all the year round, for even in the depths of winter when the vine is bare, the wind howls and the snow drifts, the white walls and whitecovered chairs and sofas, the pictures and the bowls of flowers on every surface reflect every gleam of light, giving it clarity, warmth and the illusion of sunshine.
White is perhaps not the best color for a room on a terraced hillside high up on the side of a mode~t mountain, with dogs carting mud about on broad feet, and guests wandering in from exhausting efforts with fork and trowel in the potager, but, strangely, it seems to work perfectly well.
This room is essentially designed to be lived in with ease and comfort, without restrictions. I have no idea if it reflects my personality: How could I? But I do know that it has strong echoes of almost every room of its kind which I have owned in larger houses in England, and it contains all the same old bits and pieces, mostly gathered from junk shops, so that I am familiar with them and the room feels right for me. Nothing here is new, and there is not a single stick of Louis Anything, Boulle or Sevres, which delights my French guests, who sink into fat old armchairs with little cries of relieved comfort. It is considered tres anglais, although it is really a mix of all kinds of pieces.
There is no sign of a decorator’s hand here either, which might be a good or a bad thing, depending on how one views the result. Obviously I have made furnishing “errors” here and there, mixing style and period as I see fit and with what is at hand, but everything seems to be harmonious and nothing seems “arranged.” There are no curtains (shutters do very well); no carpets, except a rush mat before the fire in winter; no tassels or pompons just clear and simple lines and the pleasing glow of the tiled floor polished to a high degree.
The test of a room such as this is simple. Clearly it will, and it does, hold fifty or more people with ease, but what is it like with, say, only two or three? Do we rattle like peas in a whistle? The answer is easy. It is still a place of harmony and comfort, a welcoming room, intimate and warm: a sitting room as snug as a nursery, and as such it passes the test, in my opinion anyway. almost resented the furniture and the
