You and your husband have recently purchased a property in Brittany with a lot of charm, what was the process of discovering and making the decision to purchase the property like?
We had been looking for a house for five years, somewhere to create, to welcome our family and friends, and to live a life closer to nature. Although we already experience some of this in our neighbourhood in Paris, as we are very close to all the shopkeepers, restaurants and producers, we were looking for a village life where, from the window, you can hear a fountain flowing and children playing ball.
I am very attached to the values my family taught me to honour in life. I grew up in a house where we created all sorts of things, where every occasion was an excuse to make something with our hands and lose ourselves for hours in creating.
My husband is quite similar and very hands-on. He makes furniture, renovates, paints and works on all kinds of projects. Although he is a prodigious photographer and works with a super clean, precise, almost millimetre-perfect aesthetic, with a great deal of poetry, he is a man gifted with creativity and with his hands.
We fell in love while cooking together, walking through forests, giving each other bouquets of stolen flowers, listening to music and dreaming about the wishes of a joyful future. A house holds all of this. A house is a home for love and creation, and we needed to find the house of our dreams in which to do all of it.
Today, I feel a great lack of creativity around me. People create less and less from almost nothing. They make fewer things by hand because everything can be done so much more easily digitally, and I find that a shame. Of course, being able to create digitally opens up different creative possibilities, but sometimes I find myself confronted with a deep melancholy at the lack of curiosity, creativity, craftsmanship, or simply the care to make things with the time they require and with creative means. I don’t miss this too much in Paris because we live Paris in our own way. Paris offers this possibility and it is wonderful once you have made it your own recipe. But today, I need large wooden pieces of furniture, an immense table where we can welcome our big circle of friends, to be able to gather enormous bouquets of flowers and branches from my garden, to simply eat the wonderful fresh produce of a maritime region, to invite my neighbours over, to know about their lives, to watch people grow and grow old, with the traces of journeys at sea on their red cheeks…
We chose this house because it has magnificent high ceilings, more than 3.5 metres. The parquet floor is made from old ship wood dating from the 1800s. The walls are tall, covered in wallpaper with a delicate mixture of carved wooden details. The rooms are large, with an immense desk, furniture filled with buttons and fabrics, and a photography studio on the top floor beneath the roof. The kitchen, with its immense fireplace, will welcome a large range cooker and a Vaudois wooden table passed down through my family… Little by little, we will restore this house, keeping the walls as they are, cherishing what already exists and living there as the continuation of a beautiful life.
