Ryan Roche and her close-knit kin thrive in their rambling 17th-century abode.
When the knitwear designer Ryan Roche and her husband, Garrett Roche, first caught sight of the 1688 stone house in Hurley, New York, that is now their home, they had, Garrett recalls, “butterflies in our tummies and two kids in seats in the back of the car.”
The house may have been, as he hastily adds, “crooked and crying out for restoration,” but the fact that this homestead had hosted extended families for hundreds of years, that generations of children had swung from its black walnut trees and teased the snapping turtles in its creek, made occupancy by Roche’s own brood seem like destiny. The clan is currently composed of Luella, twelve; Fionn, eleven; and Ronan, seven; along with Rose and Johanna, two fairly daunting Rhodesian ridgebacks; Pony, the poodle; a tiny teacup-poodle puppy so new to the family its name is either Fawn or Mimi; and rescue cats Plum and Paddy.
Since the place hadn’t really been fixed up, except for an awful seventies kitchen and a few other architectural abominations, for 100 years or so, it was, shall we say, a challenge. But you know how love is—when you fall, you fall. Luckily, Garrett, now the COO of Ryan Roche, is a former builder more than equal to installing tin ceilings, locating the perfect period doorknob, and commissioning local artisans to make a seventeenth century–style light fixture from wood found on the grounds. Still, he admits that the undertaking was so daunting that more than once he found himself sitting on the porch, “crying my eyes out.” But eventually the semi–construction site they inhabited, with Ryan cooking dinner for the kids on a hot plate, gave way to the splendid simplicity you see now.
Succeeding at the perilous balancing act of keeping the feeling and footprint of the house while accommodating the twenty-first-century needs of a growing family means that there is a 40-inch TV catty-corner to the fireplace in the parlor and a carpet that once belonged to Ryan’s great-grandmother covering the original plank floor. But if Garrett’s handiwork makes the place come alive, Ryan’s distinctive aesthetic also informs every nook and cranny—an invisible cashmere thread, if you will, connecting the earthy appeal of her designs to the plainspoken elegance of her home. In the dining room, a vast farm table made the move from the family’s former digs in Bushwick; the Dutch door is painted black to contrast with ivory walls; and the kitchen sports a Wolf stove and a Sub-Zero fridge—it’s a long way from that hot plate—decorated with a surprisingly accomplished self-portrait by Fionn. “The kids get their artistic talent from Ryan and the music from me,’’ Garrett says, and indeed, a few guitars are nonchalantly propped up in the corner, next to Fawn/Mimi’s lair.
Ryan, who grew up in Idaho and arrived in Brooklyn in 2001 with a munificent $600 in her pocket, says that when she got the call from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund contest last year telling her she had made the cut, she was in the house’s basement, which was then doubling as her studio. (She placed as one of the winners.) Now her sunny atelier, brimming with sweaters so pale and soft they seem to shriek, “Touch me! Feel me!,” occupies an outbuilding on the property, and the cellar has been repurposed as a music room, though Mom has left her traces—a collection of miniature shoes occupies a former canning closet.
But if the basement is crowded with keyboards and drum sets—Fionn and Luella are performing in a Fleetwood Mac tribute concert the very next day!—the rest of the house is stunningly spare. Upstairs, each of the children’s bedrooms features a vintage bed, found locally, and the kinds of minimal playthings—a Lego building here, a stuffed dog there—that look frankly staged. Ryan laughs at the absurdity of this suggestion. “The kids really want to be stuff-free!” she swears. “They’re more into their music and their computers.” And really, she insists, when you think about it, the house is not empty at all. “There is so much energy, with the five of us, the dogs and cats! I just want to be happy and relax and live—and not be precious about it. The house is full of love.”
Ellen DeGeneres is letting readers into her homes past and present—seven of them—with her new book titled, simply, Home. That DeGeneres has personally decorated seven properties worthy of a coffee-table book is impressive, but consider that she has actually bought and renovated 15 homes in the past 25 years and the extent of her design prowess becomes abundantly clear. As she writes in her book: “I’m pretty efficient.”
The multi-hyphenate comedian and talk show host has emerged as a serious design authority of late: launching her lifestyle collection ED, hosting Ellen’s Design Challenge, as well as selling a line on QVC. “I think I wanted to be an interior designer when I was 13,” she says. Here, we have an exclusive preview of the horse ranch she renovated and lived in with her wife, Portia de Rossi.
“Portia and I bought a 26-acre horse ranch just north of Los Angeles. Why? Why not?! It had a pretty incredible past. It was built by William Powell in the ’20s as an estate—it then became a monastery, then a rehab center, and then the horses moved in (much to Portia’s delight). It was an incredible piece of property, with eight individual cabins, several barns, and, of course, horse stables. There were also these magnificent, giant boulders scattered about. The whole place looked like it belonged on another planet.
“When we got it, the property had been a little neglected. It was a professional horse facility (I think parts of the movie Seabiscuit were filmed there), and the outbuildings that were occupied were really just basic offices. The boulders didn’t need to be touched—which is good because, well, they were boulders. But the rest of it needed a revamp, to put it lightly. Everyone thought it would take me (many) years to get it in shape, but it actually took me 12 short months. Want me to decorate your house? I’m pretty efficient. (We’ll talk about my fee at another time.)
“The first things to go were these signs that were all over the property: ‘Don’t even think about parking there.’ Wouldn’t dream of it. And then I moved on to the cabins and the barns. I approached it like I was designing and decorating 10 different homes, giving every cabin and space its own unique identity—had I not, I think it would have started to feel a bit like a hotel. But that was a unique challenge, too, because while I wasn’t fixated on making a whole ‘house’ that hangs together as one, I also wanted it all to feel like home. The only real theme that stuck was comfort.
“We lived in every cabin as we decorated and restored them one by one. When we finished one, we’d move in and begin work on the next. The first cabin we lived in didn’t have a kitchen, a bathtub, or any other amenities to speak of. But it was fun. Number 8 was the biggest cabin. For no particular reason, we spent most of our nights in Number 5, which had a screened porch and a view of an epic rock. (It really was epic.) Eventually, I redid the Art Barn, which we used as a dining room for bigger parties. There was the Romantic Barn, where Portia and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. (I surprised her with some factory lights from the early 1900s that she had seen and loved, hence the name.)
“The last thing I tackled was Portia’s Barn, which I learned should not be decorated at all. Barns are dirty. Nobody wants to dust 16 ornately framed paintings every week. But there were so many cool sculptures and art pieces that I loved in those barns and cabins; I’ve since moved a lot of them to other houses and even to my office and dressing room at work. My staff isn’t allowed to touch anything, but they are free to admire from afar. While we lived on the ranch, we tried to make use of the entire property so we could enjoy the outdoors. We put in a tennis court and put up a badminton net. It was really fun, especially when I won. And if we didn’t have guests over we could always play doubles with the coyotes and skunks that roamed the property. They were a joy. That is one thing I really loved about the ranch—we were so close to Los Angeles but able to feel secluded in a natural wonderland. Portia and I would bring out big picnic blankets and just lay around, surrounded by wildflowers and huge oak trees. When we were there instead of in the city, this really felt like our home away from home. I have to say, the ranch has been one of my favorite projects to date.”
Excerpted from the book Home by Ellen DeGeneres. Copyright (c) 2015 by Crazy Monkey, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing.
For Paris-based architect Luis Laplace and his partner, Christophe Comoy, a rambling summer estate in southern France is a place of bold contrasts and simple exuberance.Chloe Malle pays a visit.
“Do you want to meet Simon?” asks Christophe Comoy as he places a worn straw hat on his head. “Seee-mon!” He whistles shrilly, and Simon, a haughty Marans rooster, stalks proudly to the edge of his fenced-in kingdom and lets out a salutary cry. He is one of three cocks currently reigning over Combenègre, the summer home in the southwestern Midi-Pyrénées region shared by Comoy and the Paris-based Argentinian architect Luis Laplace. The couple, partners in life and business (Comoy left a career in finance to run Laplace’s firm), purchased the estate from Comoy’s cousins six years ago when his grandmother, the house’s longtime proprietor, passed away.
“Christophe, his passion is to go with the chickens. He spends hours with them,” says Laplace, who prefers to spend time in the local villages and trawling nearby brocantes, and admits he likes his chicken from the supermarket. “He talks to them, then the chickens follow him up to the house.” Two of Simon’s hens even joined the Vogue photo shoot earlier in the summer, although one, Odette, got fed up half-way through and flew out the window, never to be seen again. “She just said, ‘I’m tired of it,’ ” Comoy says with a mournful sigh. “Ça va, Ico?” he asks as the couple’s fog-gray Korat cat mewls plaintively at the coop’s perimeter. “Il est jaloux.”
The chicken coops sit below the house near the farm’s apiary. In the pantry, Laplace and Comoy have an entire armoire filled with honey—pale yellow from les fleurs d’été, dark gold from chestnut flowers in winter—as well as a medley of jams made with berries from the vast potager, or vegetable garden. When the couple return to Paris on the hour-long flight from nearby Toulouse, they travel with eggs, honey, courgettes. “We traffic, basically,” Comoy jokes. Last year Comoy made tomato sauce for days to deal with the endless kilos of tomatoes. This season he is overwhelmed by berries and plums, and has already set to work on preserves. You have to be patient with these, he tells me, holding an underripe blackberry between thumb and forefinger. “You can’t pull them off. When they are finally ripe, they should fall into your hand.”
A similar philosophy has been applied throughout this seventeenth-century onetime vineyard in la France profonde, where every detail feels lovingly and patiently addressed. The couple waited three years to find perfectly sized poplar beams for the restored stable, and throughout the house various caveats are offered regarding ongoing and future projects: a planned Moroccan hammam in the barn, a possible painting atelier. At first sight the whole rambling affair seems a world away from the clean and deliberate yet boldly chromatic designs in Laplace’s portfolio. And yet, on closer inspection, the exacting attention and deference to culture here recall a sharp-cornered villa he built for a client in Ibiza, or his celebrated transformation of a Somerset farm into Hauser & Wirth’s newest exhibition space, Durslade Farmhouse. “He has a soft touch,” says Iwan Wirth. “Whether it’s a restoration of an old building or simply choosing a fabric, his ability to have not a single Luis style but to speak all these architectural languages—that is his great quality.”
“I’m always trying to preserve the quirkiness of the house,” says Laplace as he ducks under a slanted doorframe leading into Combenègre’s master bedroom. “The way it grew was very natural, very unacademic.” The oldest section—the cave, or wine cellar—dates to 1661, the year they discovered etched into the oak foudre, a massive wine-making vat. Under Laplace and Comoy’s supervision, the foudre was dismantled and the planks turned into a dining table in the former stable, which now serves as a seasonal dining room.
Many of the other furnishings in the house remain from Comoy’s grandmother, but they have been personalized to suit the couple’s aesthetic: A mahogany armoire in the dining room, for instance, has the doors removed to reveal a neatly stacked china collection. “We preferred it without the door—it was a bit baroque,” explains Laplace. “The house needed a lot of work. A lot,” adds Comoy a bit wearily. “My grandmother lived in Toulouse, and this was a summerhouse—you know, typical French, a bit dusty, and then à la Toussaint [November 1] you close it, and you reopen it at Pâques [Easter].” Laplace and Comoy, however, use the house year-round. Christmas is spent grilling duck sausages over a blazing fireplace with Laplace’s three siblings and their children, visiting from Buenos Aires for the holiday.
When the couple met at a Christmas party in a Chelsea apartment in 2001, both were living in New York, Laplace working for the architect Annabelle Selldorf, and Comoy, a lawyer by trade, toiling in finance. Three years later they decamped to Paris, where Laplace opened his firm and Comoy eventually joined as business partner. “My goal is to take care of what Luis should not have to take care of, so he can focus on creativity,” says Comoy. In Paris their perfectly appointed apartment is on the third floor of their showroom and office building. “Yes, sometimes we talk about work on the weekend or at night,” admits Comoy, “but I mean it’s also a lifestyle. Our work is not regular work, in a way.”
On this late July afternoon Laplace has arrived at Combenègre from Gstaad, where he is restoring a chalet once owned by Gunter Sachs and installing an art gallery in the space. The architect is adept at catering to the needs of an environment where fine art is a priority: For a chalet in Megève he fashioned a swimming pool around a hallucinogenic film installation by artist Pipilotti Rist, and for a home in Majorca he designed a vast living room to accommodate a nearly ten-foot-high Louise Bourgeois spider.
“We don’t really have a formula,” explains Laplace of his approach. “Each project can be very, very different. I love to think of context, culture, geography.” Laplace traveled throughout the Albi region before beginning the Combenègre restoration. “We visited farms, estates, churches, flea markets, and museums,” he says, which helped him understand the local materials as well as the area’s history as the center of the pastel trade. One discovery was a woman who hand-mixes traditional lime paints from plants including the pastel plant, known for its indelible indigo hue. A deep-violet sitting room is the result of crushed flax, dame’s rocket, and lavender, while the rich cream of the central stairway is made from wheat; the tiny powder room under the stairs glows like the inside of a ruby.
Laplace is known for his deft use of color, challenging the notion that contemporary architects shy away from vibrant hues. He painted the entrance hall of Durslade Farmhouse a brilliant red and added riotous Bantu-print curtains in Cindy Sherman’s Left Bank pied-à-terre. “He just does it very naturally,” Sherman says of Laplace’s bold combinations. “In some cases I was skeptical, because they’re not obvious choices, but they really work.”
Vintage cow and horse busts, rescued from old butcher-shop wall displays, survey Combenègre’s activities from high perches. One wooden mare’s head wears a Renaissance crown. The stairwell is decorated with a collection of ornithological prints collected from an antiques dealer in Paris. Comoy, a bird lover, picked only species that can be found in this region: tawny owls, Eurasian Golden orioles, European greenfinches and goldfinches, gray herons. On the third floor, vintage cognac leather gym mattresses are stacked for napping or lounging, and two large wooden grape troughs from the Champagne region—plus one of the house’s recycled doors—serve as a TV console. In the evenings the couple head up there to watch Apple TV. “U.S.!” Comoy says proudly, thanks to Laplace’s American credit card. “So we watch movies here that are in the theaters in Paris.” The attic provides a sweeping view of the property’s 120 acres, a vast patchwork of fields full of corn, rape, sunflowers, and wheat.
When Comoy and Laplace bought the estate, the grounds surrounding the house were wild. “We did a lot of work with the Caterpillar.” The way Comoy pronounces cah-ter-pee-lahr makes it sound impossibly chic and not at all like a garden appliance. The planting they have done feels natural. Linden leaves crunch underfoot from the branches overhead, and red beeches provide thick pockets of shade. Comoy proudly introduces the trees he has planted: a Lebanese cedar, a young acacia, a still spindly locust. On the other side of the house a neat apple orchard overlooks a recently added linden allée.
Downstairs Laplace adds utensils to platters laid out on a large oak working bench. Comoy checks the lamb chops on the open fire, which, until the couple added the Aga stove, was the way things were cooked. “My grandmother used only the fire. Everything, even the coffee. She had no oven.”
Lunch is served on the massive table in the converted stable. Except for the meat—fire-grilled pork, lamb, and beef brochettes from the butcher in nearby Gaillac—everything comes from the potager. Potato salad with dill and onions, tomatoes sliced with basil, green beans with shallots. Berries picked this morning are removed from the freezer at the end.
“Do you prefer cassis or raspberry?” Comoy asks. Raspberry is decided upon, and Comoy transports the berries from a frozen Ziploc to the silver cylinder of the Thermomix. With the addition of an egg white and the proud flip of the switch, three minutes later the deed is done, and Comoy serves berries transformed into a rich and gelato-like consistency. “Et voilà! Sorbet!”
For the past four months, the ten finalists for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund have been toiling away designing, conceptualizing, strategizing, and stressing. Last week’s runway show at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood was the final push, at least until the winner is announced on Monday, November 2. We’ve seen their collections, like Gypsy Sport’s misfit streetwear by Rio Uribe and Matt Baldwin’s “grit and grace” in his eponymous line of denim and ready-to-wear. Now, before the competition officially comes to an end, it’s time to get a bit more personal.
Here, the designers open the doors to their homes and creative spaces, to the intimate corners of their apartments, bungalows, studios, and lofts where their inspirations, and collections, are cultivated.
Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 2 collection has been described many ways: “essentially unisex,” “dystopian,” “a lot like Spanx.” But for West, according to an interview in Vanity Fair, it simply came down to color—in particular, inspiration he drew from the modern, tonal apartments of architect Claudio Silvestrin. He describes it thusly: “. . . Stressing the importance of color, the importance of that to our sanity, these Zen, monochrome palettes,” he said. “I’ve stayed in a Claudio Silvestrin apartment since I was 26, and I love those types of palettes and that’s my opinion.” The 2,000-plus-square-foot, reportedly $4.5 million Claudio Silvestrin–designed Soho apartment is a restrained, modern architectural study featuring a wash of neutral hues, French limestone, and pearwood, as well as two large stone structures that serve as the main parts of the kitchen and bathroom, respectively. While the Kardashian family has been seen visiting the apartment in the past, it’s certainly not difficult to also imagine his army of Yeezy models in formation in the living room. Here, a look inside.
She inherited her mother’s formal Viennese sensibilities, and he his father’s flair for antiques, but together Caroline Sieber and Fritz von Westenholz make a London home all their own.
Appropriately enough for a young couple soon expecting their first child, it is the image of a tree of life that connects Caroline Sieber and her husband, Fritz von Westenholz’s, newly unveiled London house with the potent aesthetic legacies of their respective childhood homes. The design in question, a document taken from an eighteenth-century Indian-export textile, hangs at the window of a room that serves as both library and dining room, an image of flowering fecundity shadowed by the real trees in the leafy Notting Hill crescent outside. At Fritz’s family house in the English countryside, meanwhile, the same design garlands an imposing mahogany four-poster bed in a cozy guest room, while Caroline’s elegant mother, Suereyya Sieber, coincidentally also chose it to embower a bedroom in her family’s house in Austria. For while the couple has worked hard to create a home that is uniquely their own, it still resonates with echoes of the very different places where they each grew up.
“I think you subconsciously absorb it,” Caroline admits, citing the profound influence of her mother’s taste. Fritz had strong ideas of his own, having imbibed childhood lessons in style from his father, the antiques dealer, decorator, and sometime Olympic skier Baron Piers von Westenholz, who began sleuthing and selling antiques as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy with his classmate David Mlinaric (who has subsequently decorated many of the great houses of Britain), and later formed partnerships with Robert Kime and Christopher Gibbs—each of them responsible for shaping the taste of their generations. Piers, even in rural semi-retirement, continues to create suave environments for clients with such boldfaced names as Getty and Windsor.
Fritz inherited his father’s aesthetic interests, studying history of art and architecture at Edinburgh (he won the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland prize for his dissertation comparing the eighteenth-century Houghton Hall with Hopetoun, both stately and significant country palaces that he knew firsthand—Andrew Hopetoun is, after all, a cousin). On university holidays, he worked on his father’s stand at antiques fairs, but Piers, sensing that the very rich were becoming less interested in the handsome antiques that were his stock-in-trade, suggested his son choose a different path.
A more pragmatic career soon presented itself when a neighboring dealer suggested a meeting with Crispin Odey. Fritz read a story on hedge-fund managers in that evening paper’s financial pages (unimaginatively titled “Masters of the Universe”), in which it was revealed that Odey had recently paid himself a salary of £19 million. When he was finally summoned for an interview, the droll von Westenholz shamelessly told Odey, “I had a very good education; I haven’t got any money, and I’ve really got to make some if I want to continue this lifestyle. And from the sounds of it, you’ve made a lot.” Fritz was eventually rewarded for his honesty with an internship and ended up staying for eight years. It was while celebrating with his first year’s bonus at Boujis, the raucous Sloane Ranger hangout then beloved of Britain’s young princes, that the 24-year-old met the fastidiously stylish Caroline Sieber, who was transitioning from economics student to fashion stylist. (Her clients would include Emma Watson, whose transformation from Harry Potter ingenue to fashion-forward red-carpet sophisticate she helped orchestrate.)
Nearly a decade later, Fritz proposed, and the couple found themselves on a serious house hunt. They fell for a home that was somewhat forlorn after years as a rental property. “Most people couldn’t see what I liked about it,” Caroline admits. “It was very dark and hadn’t been touched for 30 years.” But a 1980s renovation had resulted in some ingenious interventions on the classic nineteenth-century floor plan, with double-height spaces and added windows bringing light into its darker corners. “When you walked in you just had this wall of green,” Caroline remembers of the view of the evergreen garden through a glass wall, which she has widened even more, so that now, “even when you’re in the kitchen you feel like you are sitting in the garden.”
Piers would gladly have offered his design counsel to the couple, but “I would always insist on doing it on my own,” says Caroline. “I can dress myself—why wouldn’t I be able to decorate my own house? It’s meant to be fun, right?”
In spite of his own strong aesthetic instincts and preferences, Fritz gallantly surrendered to his wife. “I had a very strong idea of what I wanted,” says Caroline, “and I wasn’t that worried about making mistakes, because this is for us, you know? So we went for crazy colors and lots of patterns.”
The largest basement room has now been coopted to house Caroline’s extensive wardrobe, stocked with pieces from designer friends including Erdem Moralioglu and Christopher Kane, and an abundance of classic Chanel jackets—she is a loyal friend of the brand—that closely resemble the traditional Austrian boiled-wool jackets with felted contrasting bindings that Caroline finds at Lanz. Clothes no longer in circulation are carefully vacuum packed or kept in the bachelorette apartment that, she sheepishly admits, she held on to for the purpose.
The dining-room library, meanwhile, is crowded with the monographs that Caroline drew on for inspiration—Jacques Grange, Elsie de Wolfe, and Madeleine Castaing among them. “It’s a whole new world you’re discovering,” she explains. She developed mood boards as she would for her styling projects, and built up a library of fabric samples from such companies as Claremont, Braquenié, Sam Kasten, and Madeleine Castaing, whose mid–nineteenth century document prints she finds “feminine but not ditzy.”
As well as ransacking the barns where the Baron von Westenholz keeps a treasury of antiques for his projects and clients, the couple were able to call on the practiced services of his highly skilled team of builders and artisans, sometimes alarming the suppliers with their choices. “They’d say, ‘Are you sure this is the correct order?’ ” Caroline says, laughing, “ ‘because it doesn’t look like anything you’ve been ordering for the past 30 years!’ ” Where her father-in-law invariably uses yellow-based matte paints that add a subtle patina to his schemes, for instance, Caroline opted for clear, blue-based paints in a highly lacquered gloss that place the house firmly in the twenty-first century. For the living room, she also fell in love with a Zuber wallpaper with a design of tropical birds disporting themselves in flowering branches and had it recolored to match the strident arsenic green of a beloved Rochas dress designed by Olivier Theyskens. Its giddying cost was mitigated by Caroline’s artful protestations that it was so busy and decorative that they wouldn’t need to buy any art to hang on top of it. Besides, it brings a flowering garden into the house even in London’s bleakest months.
I would always insist on doing it on my own,” says Caroline. “I can dress myself—why wouldn’t I be able to decorate my own house?
The room, which runs the full depth of the house, is now convivially arranged with groupings of nineteenth-century chairs and sofas, quirky occasional tables, and lamps shaded with old sari fabrics. The juxtapositions evoke Fritz’s family house, Barrows (named for an Anglo-Saxon burial mound on the property), which started life as a farmworker’s cottage Piers was given by his father when he wed his first wife, Arabella von Hofmannsthal, at the tender age of eighteen. After Piers married Fritz’s mother, Jane Leveson, in the late seventies, they extended the cottage into an L-shape and eventually a U, with an imposing entrance hall and multiple guest rooms. The result is the epitome of insouciant English country-house comfort and unforced elegance, an interior of flowering cretonnes and druggets, where objects of intriguing beauty and charm are disposed with an effortless touch.
Caroline spent her formative years in a wing of Vienna’s stately Palais Schwarzenberg, built at the turn of the eighteenth century, later moving to an equally decorous house in the nearby Gloriettegasse, once acquired by the Emperor Franz Joseph himself for his mistress, the actress Katharina Schratt. Franz Joseph’s more complex empress, the famed Hungarian beauty Elisabeth—known to all as “Sissi”—was later incarnated by the beauteous Romy Schneider in a trilogy of 1950s movies that were required viewing for impressionable young Austrian girls. “I know every single one of them by heart!” claims Caroline, who channeled the empress’s signature Worth dresses when it came time to create her own wedding ensemble, made by Chanel couture and based on a magnificent ball gown Karl Lagerfeld designed in the early eighties.
The Siebers’ Viennese house has been scrupulously restored, furnished, and decorated to reflect its imperial past—but its formality, as Caroline admits, is not very child-friendly. “To this day my mother would be appalled at the idea of a sofa that looks too comfortable.” So when it came to decorating her own home, she wanted “something more contemporary, younger.” She sates her nostalgia for her hometown by serving guests the empress’s beloved crystallized violets—still made by the Viennese confectioner Demel—and by placing Biedermeier furniture among the deft mix of pieces that span the eras from Baroque to Gio Ponti via Regency and Arts and Crafts. There is an echo of imperial Vienna in Fritz and Caroline’s living room, too—a settee of rococo swirls and volutes found in the depths of a Barrows barn and destined for Caroline’s dressing room, for which it was upholstered in a melting sorbet-pink velvet. When it arrived, however, the room’s doors and windows proved too narrow for it to pass through, so it headed upstairs to the living room instead, clearly waiting for a latter-day Sissi to swoon upon it.
“I’ll fully confess that when Caroline came up with some of these ideas, I said, ‘No way,’ ” says Fritz wryly, “but obviously I came around and now love it.”
Fritz’s gallantry, however, was sorely tested by some of his wife’s innovations. His family houses have always had carpet underfoot, rugs layered over wall-to-wall fitted carpets—even in the bathrooms, in the classic English country-house manner. “But being Austrian, it’s the most unhygienic thing for me,” says Caroline firmly. Her master bathroom of marble, chrome, and Tiffany-blue verre eglomise might have been inspired by the Duke of Windsor’s in Paris, but also evokes the pristine Belle Époque example in her parents’ house.
Much as he craved carpets underfoot, however, Fritz balked at his wife’s idea for a stair runner—in dazzling shocking pink. The resourceful Caroline, however, found a way to sugar even this pill. “We call it red,” she says, “so officially it’s red!” “It’s maroon,” says Fritz with a resigned smile.
“It’s been so much fun,” says Caroline. “Now I can’t wait for the next project. I love that Fritz is interested in houses,” she adds, “and I hope one day we’ll have a very nice country house. I cannot wait,” she adds wistfully, “to start doing gardens.”
Sittings Editor: Hamish Bowles Hair: Gary Glossman; Makeup: Lauren Hersheson. Wedding: Robert Fairer
Christmas is almost upon us, so we’re taking a look back at one of the most flawlessly festive cabins, Amanda Brooks’s Adirondack getaway. A towering Christmas tree, a roaring evergreen-topped fireplace, and rustic charm for days—this is what holiday dreams are made of.
“It’s very rustic, so when it’s time to decorate for Christmas, you have to be really careful. You don’t want to overglamorize it,” says I Love Your Style author Amanda Brooks of the winter wonderland her family has created in the forests of the Adirondack mountains. To green the house for the holidays (using indigenous plants), the family enlisted the help of a group of local farmers from Rivermede Farm. “We had them over for a drink the other night to show them how great their worked looked,” Brooks says. “They did an amazing job.” That, in our opinion, is the understatement of the season, and we thought it was the perfect place to get you into the spirit in these last few days before Christmas. The house, designed by Brooks’s mother, Elizabeth Stewart, in the 1980s, has become a family meeting spot, sleeping the entire extended brood during the summer, fall, and winter months. “This is the place where we can really get away and connect with nature,” Brooks says. “It’s a big part of who we are.”
It was only fitting that America’s beloved Francophile chef split her time between the two countries. In a 1969 interview with Vogue, Julia Child explained, “We love the fresh summers and fall air of New England, but we spend winter and spring at our getaway in Provence.”
After spending the warmer months in a clapboard-style house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the cuisinière and her diplomat-artist husband, Paul, would retreat to La Pitchoune, their country home in the South of France.
Situated by an olive grove a half-hour’s drive from Cannes, the kitchen of the stucco cottage served as the test lab for Child’s culinary experiments, which have been re-created time and time again in kitchens across the world by way of her famed multivolume recipe books Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Described by Child as “my love, kitchen engineer, painter, and taster,” Paul designed the kitchen especially for his wife, raising the counters to accommodate the chef (who stood at 6-foot-2) and lining the walls with pegboard and hooks to store a wide array of copper pots and cooking accoutrements.
Three cozy bedrooms, a wood-burning fireplace, and a studio-kitchenette combo are found elsewhere in the 1,500-square-foot house. Olive trees and the region’s native lavender grow outside, where a pool (a recent addition by the home’s current owner) sits by the shaded terrace.
Until now, a re-creation of her Cambridge kitchen at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has been the only entrée into the world of Julia Child for fans of the television personality. With an asking price of $880,000, La Pitchoune is now on the market for those wanting to master the art of French cooking at the source. Here, take a look inside.
“I’ve always wanted to do lots of different things in the design world,” says the British artist and interior decorator Luke Edward Hall of his unconventional career, which has seen him arrive at interiors by way of magazines and menswear. “I know how I want things to look and that’s not just limited to one discipline.” This prolific 26-year-old’s creative streak started early. As a teenager growing up in Hampshire, Hall produced fanzines and painted T-shirts to distribute to local stores; while studying menswear at Central Saint Martin’s he and his pals collected ’20s glassware and objet to sell online. The collecting bug has never left him. His current wish list includes a marble bust, a set of hexagonal Murano glasses, a taxidermy flamingo and a vintage fairground sign that reads “Aloha.” Hall’s aesthetic is nothing if not eclectic.
Before striking out on his own this summer, Hall worked for the architectural designer Ben Pentreath. It was here that he honed his eye for antiques and salvage, and his great love of color. They’re skills he’s applying to his first solo project—the decoration of a handsome country house in Kent. “We’re taking it very slowly,” he says of the Georgian property, which requires much restoration work. “But we’ve already picked out a deep sea green for the drawing room and covered a custom-made sofa in mustard corduroy.” This is typical of Hall, who injects freshness and fun into classic English decorative schemes with offbeat tones often pulled straight from his jaunts around the Amalfi Coast.
In parallel with his enviable interiors projects Hall produces his own collection of decorative accessories, which he hawks on 1stDibs. Painterly cushions and fabrics that draw on influences from Bloomsbury to Jean Cocteau sit alongside his own pop-hued sketches and portraits: Breton-wearing sailors, cocktail glasses, dreamy interior schemes, lobsters, and Greek gods are a vivid record of his tastes and travels. When Hall can’t find exactly what he wants, he’ll make it himself: “I’ve been looking for the right throw for ages,” he says of the thickly striped blankets he’s having made in a Welsh woolen mill in peppy color combinations of deep blue with orange, and kingfisher teal with bright pink. It’s no wonder The Parker Palm Springs Hotel has tapped him up to illustrate a colorful series of rooms and poolside scenes for them.
It was while vacationing in Positano, Italy, this summer that Hall struck up another fruitful association, with creative director Alex Eagle. The duo is currently collaborating on a selection of ceramics to be sold in Eagle’s eponymous London store. “They’re inspired by Picasso’s ceramics,” Hall explains of the hand-painted platters and plates that are in the works. “I want to create one-off pieces that are fun and decorative. I’ll be drawing directly onto the pottery. It’s unknown territory for me.” Hall’s other new design, a delectable collage pattern called Greek Key, is designated to become both a fabric for his own line, and the wrapping for chocolate by Brooklyn’s Fine and Raw, also for Eagle.
There’s no doubt that Hall is destined for big things. But with his foppish hair and predilection for the historical, does he ever feel that his aesthetic is out of step with the times? “Everything is getting much more maximalist,” he says hopefully of the swing toward decorative interiors, citing the more-is-more bible, Cabana magazine, as living proof. “People are being braver with pattern and brighter colors. And that’s what I’m all about.” Here, a look at his inspiring London flat and a guide to his favorite antiques and interiors haunts in and around London—and what to look out for while you’re there.
Ebury Trading
“We picked up our mid-century marble-topped dining table, which is classic but fun, at this treasure trove of antiques and lighting. Right now, they have an incredible stock of Georgian Irish mirrors, which I have my eye on. Embellished with colored rock crystals, they’re so elegant.”
Howe “Christopher Howe has an extraordinary collection of antiques dating from the 20th century right through to the 17th century. It’s a great place to come when you’re trying to find odd bits and pieces from Anglepoise lamps to George III side tables. I’m a big fan of their traditional feather- and down-filled armchairs. Made to order, they come upholstered in antique dyed linens from their fabric and leather shop around the corner.”
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“This store specializes in 20th century decorative pieces, often from Italy. Our amazing bar cabinet, which is inlaid with malachite panels, came from here. When you open it up it has pink lighting and glass shelves and a mirrored back. It’s so beautiful.” Portobello Road Antiques Market
“After Saturday brunch at Granger & Co., I’ll stroll around the market stalls at the top of Portobello Road. It’s great for ceramics and vintage books. I picked up these old King Penguin titles there, which have the most amazing covers.”
Jamb
“Best-known for their impressive reproduction lighting and fireplaces, Jamb’s Pimlico showroom is home to a riot of antiques and curiosities. This is where I spotted the rather magnificent stuffed flamingo, which is currently at the top of my wish list.”
Themes and Variations
“This Notting Hill dealer stocks a wealth of postwar and contemporary design. They have lots of pieces from one of my all-time favorite designers, Piero Fornasetti. Oh, how I long for a Fornasetti chest of drawers, or at the very least, a wastepaper basket.”
Pentreath & Hall
“Alongside obelisks and beautiful alphabet brush pots by Bridie Hall, you’ll find a small selection of antique accessories from Staffordshire spaniels to Wedgwood teapots and framed classical prints. I defy anyone to leave empty-handed.”
Lassco
“Set across two spectacular London sites—one is on Maltby Street in Bermondsey and the other is in a Georgian mansion, perched on the Vauxhall roundabout, also home to the fabulous Brunswick House restaurant—you never know what you might come across. Glittering brass chandeliers, old fairground signs, and reclaimed stone fountains—their range is quite staggering.”
Westenholtz
“Situated just outside London, this antiques and interiors firm is well worth a visit for everything from a George III four-poster bed to a plaster bust of Socrates. I adore their selection of English Aesthetic furniture.”
Rose Uniacke
“I love this store. Uniacke, who recently renovated Victoria Beckham’s London home, has an amazing eye for simple, beautiful objects. Her own furniture and lighting is sold together with a careful selection of antiques—everything from ceramic pitchers to pieces by Mario Ceroli and Frits Schlegel.” 76 Pimlico Road, London SW1W 8PL
Most people spend their daily lives in one place, maybe two—artist Mickalene Thomas splits her time among four. But between her studio, her partner Racquel’s Chelsea apartment, a country house in Connecticut, and her own Brooklyn brownstone, it’s that last residence that Thomas calls home. “It’s our sanctuary,” she says, referring to the house in which she lives with her elementary school–age daughter, Junya, “because the other spaces we share with others. It’s our little retreat, a getaway, a staycation. It’s like having our own room.”
Even when Junya is off at school, her presence is everywhere in Thomas’s townhouse. Junya’s framed artwork hangs alongside that of Huma Bhabha (who is “the kind of artist I hope to be,” Thomas says), Kara Walker, and Thomas’s friends Henry Taylor, Derrick Adams, and Wangechi Mutu. In fact, Junya’s “awesomeness paintings” are arguably given more pride of place than even Thomas’s prized Matisse drawing, which is on display in her downstairs bedroom. Tellingly, it’s a Junya piece and not the Matisse that hangs above the mantel in the front sitting room. Moreover, little Junya makes collages, not unlike the other art that Thomas collects. “Junya calls herself an artist,” Thomas says. “She may be one someday, she may not be, but for now it’s encouraged.”
Whether or not Junya continues to paint into adulthood, the immediate effect her creations have on her mother’s celebrated work is palpable. “She reminds me of the freedom of childhood,” Thomas says, “how to play with materials without being beholden to weighted ideas and theories. Her work is a reminder for my own practice.” Thomas sees the rest of her collection in a similar light—as work that makes a daily impact on her own. “I look to a lot of artists who don’t focus on one medium, who you can’t pigeonhole,” Thomas says. “I do that, but not as much, and I think that’s why I like them, because I see something in them that I wish I’d done. What you put on your wall should be inspiration.”
For a man whose entire life is based around sourcing and curating masterfully designed furniture from the U.S., Europe, and South America, the 1932 Art Deco Miami home Stephan Weishaupt purchased in 2013 presented an intriguing creative opportunity. After renovating the interior space, Weishaupt, who is the founder of the Toronto-based contemporary furniture showroom Avenue Road, filled it with an impressive roster of designers like Christophe Delcourt, David Weeks, and Oscar Niemeyer. The result is a smartly eclectic mix of whitewashed walls and Deco lines with shape-shifting modern decor. Though Weishaupt admits that this began as just another project for him (he intended to treat the space as his third showroom outside of New York and Toronto), it ultimately turned into his favorite place to rest and to entertain. “I wanted the home to have personality and the objects in it to have stories behind them, ones that any visitor could connect with,” he says. “Aside from the design elements, it’s also a space where I can connect with friends and family, and it’s important to me that they feel comfortable in my home—that really helps me relax.” And how does it compare with his home and work base back in Toronto? “Miami is more expressive, a little riskier, and more fun.”
Below, Weishaupt walks us through his striking Miami digs.
The sublime space that belongs to Parisian designer Vanessa Seward’s daughter in their family’s 17th Arrondissement flat used to be a dining room. Seward’s husband, who is color blind, painted the walls a blush pink and soft purple, unaware that his future child would be a girl. “I am very glad we had a girl,” notes Seward, former accessories designer for Chanel and Tom Ford who now has her own eponymous label. “Otherwise, it would be quite problematic for a boy, no?”
Jacqueline is her name, she is 5 years old, and the room her mother has decorated for her is a thing of little French girl dreams, however grown-up some of the furniture surrounding her may seem. “Even her name is very old-fashioned; I think she is the only Jacqueline of her generation,” says Seward. “It seemed appropriate to fill her room with some things from the past. Many of the elements came from my maternal grandmother’s apartment in Buenos Aires, which was decorated in a similar manner.”
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Those treasured vintage elements, mixed in with Elmo, Paddington Bear, and a mini guitar from Jacqueline’s musician father among many, many other toys, include large Chinese screens, an Oriental trunk, an Impressionist-style painting, and a small velvet accent seat. Other than the items that were passed down to Jacqueline, Seward punctuated the space with Josef Frank print Svenskt Tenn curtains and a small red chair from The Rocking Company given to them by a dear friend. “When I started to decorate Jacqueline’s room, I thought to myself, This is completely ridiculous for a child,” Seward adds. “I thought it was pretty sophisticated at first, but when it was finished, I was happy because I realized being surrounded by these nice things will help her develop an eye. Plus, it’s just fun.”
His metamorphic career unfolded under varying stage names, theatrical personas, and artistic mediums, with a wardrobe that encompassed everything from body to zoot to space suits. And so it makes perfect sense that David Bowie (aesthetically lost in time and space) would call an Indonesian-inspired retreat on the Caribbean island of Mustique home. And the property, which was sold to the late publishing magnate Felix Dennis in 1995, is now back on the market.
Surrounded by the region’s famed turquoise waters, the island owes its reputation as a destination hot spot for celebrities and royalty alike to Princess Margaret. In 1960, the queen’s younger sister built an island getaway, and soon after, Mick Jagger (Georgia May Jagger often retreats to the Japanese-style home) and David Bowie followed suit.
Architect Arne Hasselqvist built a series of Scandinavian- and Japanese-style pavilions that made up the five-bedroom villa Bowie shared with his wife, Iman. The late singer-songwriter commissioned designers Robert J. Litwiller, Linda Garland, and Michael White to realize the design scheme, a pastiche potpourri inspired by all the islands that make up Indonesia. The result: an alfresco teak Javanese dining hut, colorful Balinese living room doors, carved columns inspired by those found on Sumbawa, and bamboo vaulted ceilings. Egyptian revival, Indian, and English furnishings added to the cultural mélange inside the home. Outside, two koi ponds wrap around the property where one can also find a swimming pool and performance stage for added entertainment after watching the Caribbean sunset. “It’s a whim personified,” Bowie told Architectural Digest in 1992. “I love a good cliché, and this house for me is just the most delightful cliché.”
When Amanda Chantal Bacon opened her tiny juice shop on Rose Avenue in Los Angeles four years ago, she didn’t think she’d be leaving the neighborhood anytime soon. “I had this amazing love shack in Venice that I bought the month I opened Moon Juice,” she recalls, explaining how she poured heart and soul into the ground-up renovation. “I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else.” At the time, she also couldn’t imagine the frenzy her business would stoke in the local wellness scene (and beyond—New York locations are next), and as Moon Juice expanded elsewhere in the city, Bacon cast an eye further afield, too.
“I wanted something that was big and bright and open, with really clean lines—something that my little boy could turn into a very big boy in,” she says, referring to her energetic son, Rohan, now 4. With the help of a real estate friend, she soon found what she was looking for: an airy, cabin-like house nestled against a sloping hillside in Rustic Canyon, a quiet enclave in west Los Angeles. Built in the late 1950s with a pop-out Frank Gehry addition from 1983—with windows designed to frame the rise and fall of the moon—the 4,000-square-foot home was, to Bacon, as much an investment in contemporary architecture as it was an opportunity to finally realize her free-form approach to living. Formal dining room, no; steady stream of houseguests, yes.
Several months after settling in, her eclectic strand of warm modernism is on view in just about every room. There are iconic pieces of design (a round Saarinen table, Alessandro Becchi’s Anfibio sofa); a collection of mid-century lighting; a tactile mix of sheepskins and Moroccan rugs; and the sort of accents you might expect of a rising wellness guru, like large-scale crystals and a prism hung in an upstairs window that refracts rainbows across the room. Many of the house’s existing features, such as the wide-plank hemlock floors downstairs and the wooden hot tub on the patio, filled with oxygenated, alkalized water, fit seamlessly into Bacon’s vision; other elements, namely the disco-era wet bar upstairs, have an expiration date. “This is being turned into a breakfast bar. It will be raw pink stone—no more smoky mirrors!” she says with a laugh, running her hand over the counter. But as with Moon Juice, she’s thoughtfully planning her next moves and enjoying the process. “There’s a white owl that lives in the tree that hoots at night, and there are incredible hikes right there,” Bacon says, gesturing through the kitchen’s glass doors that lead to an outdoor dining area. “It’s almost like a retreat center. That’s kind of how the house is unfolding.”
A story on Amanda Chantal Bacon and the rise of Moon Juice appears in the January 2016 issue of Vogue.
Perhaps Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are in nesting mode after announcing that they are expecting their first child. The couple recently purchased a new Beverly Hills home, complete with five bedrooms—room for even more little Teigen-Legends—and eight bathrooms. There are also stunning city and ocean views, a movie theater, an oversize walk-in closet, and a sprawling kitchen with plenty of room for Teigen to test recipes for her forthcoming cookbook.
Fun fact: Rihanna previously owned the house. Reportedly, it was one of a series of ill-advised investments that led to the singer filing a lawsuit against her then-accountants which was subsequently settled. The whole to-do became the inspiration for the revenge-happy 2015 “Bitch Better Have My Money” video. Here’s hoping Teigen and Legend are much more satisfied with their purchase, and that the nursery decorations are ready in time for the new addition.
Camelot’s spell, cast decades ago by John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, has lost little of its potency. Perhaps because the First Family, with their youth, good looks, and talent, became symbols of hope and new beginnings. It didn’t hurt, either, that they had style. Objects from the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach, Florida, compound are on preview before going under the hammer on the 23rd at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers.
Joseph P. Kennedy acquired the beachfront house, built by Addison Mizner, who developed the Palm Beach style, in 1933; it became known as the Winter White House when John F. Kennedy was in office. The president played, politicked, and wrote part of Profiles in Courage there. In 1995 the compound, and some of its contents, was sold. “It’s special to try to retain this history for America, and so I felt some obligation to do that,” the buyer, John Castle, once said. With this sale, the Castle family shares a part of that legacy.
There’s something particularly moving about wandering the halls of a home that once belonged to an iconic artist, a feeling that transcends simply viewing their works on a museum wall. There’s a spirit that seems to linger in the gardens, the creaking floors, and the hidden nooks and crannies where they gathered their inspiration. At Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in New Mexico, her windows frame the desert landscape scenes immortalized in her art. Inside Dalí’s house in northern Spain, the curves and shapes of the furniture and decor are straight out of one of his Surrealist paintings. And while there aren’t many famous artist residences left open to the public anymore, the ones that do exist have been so well preserved that to enter one is to enter another time and place and creative mind entirely. Here, 10 of the most stirring artist homes that are still welcoming visitors:
Sleeping in the same quarters as someone famous is a total fantasy (unless, of course, you’re a particularly successful groupie). But taking a vacation in a luminary’s or celebrity’s former digs is a dream that can actually come true thanks to companies like Airbnb and HomeAway. Ever wonder what it was like to have a drink—or 10—with Frank Sinatra by the pool in Palm Springs? Or sit on the couch watching Yves Klein swish his blue across a canvas? This category of rental properties offers something much more valuable than room service and turndowns: It offers a chance to reside, for a moment, in the spaces once occupied by iconic artists, musicians, and novelists. Intrigued? Here are the five most amazing famous rental homes that will make you want to cancel that hotel reservation.
Not only did this desert home once belong to Sinatra, but it’s also a stunning example of mid-century modern architecture. The four-bedroom, six-bath house was built by E. Stewart Williams in 1947, and is equipped with a piano-shaped pool and large outdoor terrace. Inside, there’s a lot of old-school, cheeky ’50s decor (palm wallpaper, shag carpets, sculptural lighting) and a vintage audio system.
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Photo: courtesy of airbnb
Yves Klein’s Studio in Paris
Located in Paris’s Montparnasse neighborhood, this three-bedroom apartment is in the same building that once housed the studio of the artist Yves Klein. The loft-like space is clean and minimal throughout, updated and renovated since the time when Klein was there. Though it’s gone through modern changes, the space looks and still feels like a creative space.
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Photo: Courtesy of Tenuta il Palagio
Sting’s Villa in Figline Valdarno, Italy
This gorgeous 16th-century villa is located about 45 minutes from Florence. It’s owned by Sting and Trudie Styler, who spent summers there for more than 15 years and now rent it out to the public. The estate is comprised of the main home and three smaller houses, as well as a vineyard and olive grove.
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Photo: Courtesy of airbnb
John Steinbeck’s Studio Near Monterey, California The Grapes of Wrath author used to spend time writing in this quaint one-bedroom, one-bathroom Pacific Grove cottage. While it’s tiny (only about 350 square feet), it’s probably one of the more intimate settings that once provided solace to one of the literary world’s most famous and prolific writers.
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Photo: Courtesy of The Mustique Company
Mick Jagger’s Villa in Mustique
If you’re really willing to shell out for a celebrity vacation rental, Mick Jagger’s amazing beachfront island home, called “Stargroves,” is just the ticket. Situated on the private island of Mustique, the house can hold 10 guests and comes with a staff of four. Next door, the rock star also owns and rents out a smaller, three-bedroom estate called “Pelican Beach.”
It’s a story line fit for film: A 30-year-old American woman buys Julia Child’s house in the idyllic countryside of Provence on a whim and opens up her own cooking school. But that’s the reality for Makenna Johnston. Not because she’s always hoped to teach cooking (she hasn’t) or because she’s a chef trained in traditional French cuisine (she’s not . . . yet). Johnston bought the culinary icon’s former home because she couldn’t bear the thought of it going to a buyer who didn’t care about preserving Child’s time-capsule kitchen, or someone who wouldn’t allow others to visit and share in the storied property. And also because—like Child—she’s an American-born Francophile with a love for community, adventure, and courageous cooking.
Johnston grew up in Colorado, with a fast-food–exec father and a family that appreciated good food, regardless of its pedigree. They also loved all things French and visited the country a few times a year. As an adventurous 4-year-old on a family vacation to California, Johnston tried escargot in garlic-herb butter. “It opened up this whole world to me, learning food could taste like that,” she recalls. Back at home, she started watching reruns of The French Chef on PBS and was fascinated by Julia Child. “She was almost a caricature of herself. So tall, with that unique voice and magnetic presence—she was a larger-than-life personality across the board.”
Jump to last November: A now 30-year-old Johnston is self-employed as a business strategist and life coach. When she reads that La Pitchoune, Child’s former home in France, is up for sale, she immediately feels an urgent rush to make the house hers, even though she knows the idea seems preposterous. But the timing is right: Her wife, Yvonne Johnston—a career U.S. Air Force captain—had been searching for her footing since she was released from the military in 2014. “Yvonne enlisted when she was 18, a few months before she graduated from high school, so that’s who she’d been her entire adult life. Ever since, she’d really just been trying to rebuild her identity,” says Makenna. The pair were avid home cooks, loved throwing big dinner parties, and had even catered their own wedding. Culinary school hadn’t been on either of their radars because of the expense. But when they learned that the International Culinary Center in New York City offers a generous military scholarship, they got a few investors on board and formulated a plan to buy the house and run a cooking school in the spirit of Child.
La Pitchoune (“The Little Thing”) was built in 1966 by Julia and Paul Child on the property of friend and longtime culinary collaborator Simca Beck. It’s a modest home, with a kitchen cleverly outfitted with extra-tall countertops to accommodate Julia’s 6-foot-2 frame and pegboard walls with outlines showing where to hang each individual cooking implement. (Paul had also installed the same pegboard system in the Childs’ kitchen in Massachusetts, which is now housed in the Smithsonian.)
In 1993, the house changed hands to Kathie Alex, who knew and worked for Child, with the understanding that she would use “La Peetch” as a cooking school. When Alex put the house on the market in November 2015, it must have seemed fateful that Makenna wanted to buy the property—not only because she also intended to preserve the house in its entirety and continue using it as a cooking school, but also because both Child and Makenna share an alma mater: Smith College.
The Johnstons plan to finalize the sale next month, rent the guesthouse starting in May, and open the main house as a cooking and yoga retreat in 2017. (“The yoga component will be totally optional, I promise! I’m not going to use a cattle prod to get people to earn their butter,” jokes Makenna.) Yvonne, who’s already enrolled at ICC, will be the head chef, but Makenna also plans on earning a diploma in “bits and bobs” by taking intensive, one-month classes at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. They know there will be naysayers to their approach. “I think a lot of people will ask, ‘Who are these two girls teaching cooking classes in Julia Child’s kitchen right after finishing culinary school?’” says Makenna. “But we really just want to preserve the spirit and the integrity of her home. We know it’s a big responsibility.”
Any detractors should remember that Child fell into the culinary world rather casually herself, and started at a much less capable place than Makenna and Yvonne Johnston. Her first attempts were disastrous, and she even failed her first exam at Le Cordon Bleu. But Child’s resilience, joie de vivre, and ability to improvise were exactly the qualities that endeared her to so many: She took the fear out of cooking.
The Johnstons will call their classes “courageous cooking” sessions as homage to one of Child’s greatest TV moments, when she was ostensibly showing her viewers how to flip a potato pancake: “When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,” she starts. But when her tenuous flip lands half the pancake on the stovetop, she explains: “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.” That philosophy is what ultimately inspired the Johnstons to take on Le Peetch, and it’s precisely the type of fearlessness they want to encourage in their students. “We want to empower people to practice bigger, bolder, devil-may-care cooking,” says Makenna. “And we’re happy to be the ones cleaning the omelets off the ceiling.”
