Outside Paris, a 19th-Century House Conceals a Minimalist Tableau Rich With Color
On an overcast morning in October 2018, Alix and Onur Keçe approached an overgrown plot in the Vexin nature preserve northwest of Paris just as the sun broke through the clouds.
The couple, whose main residence is an apartment in the city’s tony 7th arrondissement, had been looking for a country home for years. They wanted a place where their two daughters—Ellis, six, and Panda, three—could run freely, and ideally it would be within an hour’s car ride so that "there wouldn’t be too much screaming on the way there," says Onur.
A white gravel allée leads to Onur and Alix Keçe’s weekend retreat an hour outside Paris. The couple, a pair of creatives, oversaw the renovation of the long-neglected 1892 structure themselves, with Onur designing the living spaces and built-ins and Alix responsible for everything else.
In the primary bedroom, daughters Ellis and Panda play on pieces of a 1972 Camaleonda sofa by Mario Bellini. A Davide Groppi Moon pendant, made of Japanese paper, hangs overhead.
They’d looked at numerous properties, but none measured up to the traditional stone house that stood sunlit before them on that fall day. Built in 1892 at the edge of a forest, the house, with a three-story tower and an attached ivy-covered barn, was part of a compound that also included two additional one-room structures.
Left untouched since the 1960s, and visited only once a year by the previous owners, the home had fallen into disrepair. "The garden was like a jungle—but that is what we loved about it," says Onur.
A concrete staircase leads to a newly added mezzanine that contains Onur and Alix’s bathroom and a small sauna. A gloss-sealed MDF closet doubles as a headboard for the couple’s floating concrete bed. Behind the closet is the girls’ bedroom and bath.
In the bathroom, the cast iron tub is a Paris flea market find, and the cement floor tiles were designed by Alix and made in Istanbul. "I love to use mosaic tiles in gradations of color," she says.
The couple immediately saw the property’s potential. Both are creative directors of companies they founded—Alix, who retains her last name, Petit, professionally, at the women’s wear line Heimstone, and Onur at design/communications agency The Refreshment Club.
They planned to maintain the exteriors but reimagined the interiors as a clean-lined ode to concrete and immersive swaths of color. Onur designed the renovation himself and worked with a local contractor to realize it.
Like the teal-painted bedroom suite, where 12-foot-long patterned curtains block the morning sun, every room in the compound has a signature color scheme.
The Keçes knew that having a large communal space would be key. "In Paris, the children have a pretty big bedroom, but they’re never in there," says Onur. "They’re always in our bedroom or the living room."
This inspired them to transform the spacious, high-ceilinged barn into a multipurpose bedroom suite much like an urban loft—fitting, as the couple had met while living in New York City.
"Each room is a color box with a specific color from floor to ceiling," says Alix. "It creates a kind of unity."
At the center, Onur placed a floating, three-ton concrete bed inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of built-in furniture. There’s a fireplace in the sitting area and another fireplace on the adjacent patio, reached via tall glass doors. To keep the children close yet give them their own space, Onur designed a "cubby house" tucked behind the MDF-clad walk-in closet—a tiny room with bunk beds and an en suite bathroom nook.
Here, it was Ellis who provided the creative direction with just one word—"rainbow"—which describes the colorful array of floor-to-ceiling tiles. For their own bathroom, Alix and Onur took advantage of the barn’s 24-foot vaulted ceiling, placing the bathroom and a two-person sauna on a lofted level reached by a floating concrete staircase. A glass wall overlooks the bedroom below.
Shop the Look
In the Coral Room, on the top floor of the tower, the hues range from dusty pink to burgundy.
The bathroom in the guesthouse retains the claw-foot tub that came with the property.
Onur visualized open, minimalist spaces, but Alix is "a big hater of white walls," he says. Onur got his open spaces, but Alix injected surfaces with color, from the pink-tinted concrete countertops and bespoke patterned tiles in the kitchen to the similarly patterned curtains in the barn—all referencing the vibrant fabrics she designs for her clothing brand.
For the walls and ceilings, she chose an array of lime-based paints applied with a technique known as chaux ferrée, which produces a textured effect like that of Venetian painted plaster. "My eyes are always much more responsive to colors and patterns than to plain, white things," Alix explains.
The window recesses in the living area have rounded edges. "All of the details are curved in this room, to add softness," says Onur.
"We were looking for something that was in bad shape, a place we could completely tear apart and renovate from scratch."
—Onur Keçe, designer and resident
A pink concrete dining-cum-coffee table holds a fire-pit at one end, where it’s surrounded by a pair of Gae Aulenti lounge chairs, a Tufty Time sofa from B&B Italia, and a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair. The 1930s dining chairs are by Hynek Gottwald and the tab floor lamp is by Flos.
In the one-level main house, converted into the family’s living area, Onur devised opportunities to "come together around food." What had previously been four small rooms was converted to an open plan space with a vaulted ceiling that reaches nearly sixteen-and-a-half-feet high at its peak. A pink-tinted concrete table as long as the ceiling is high spans the dining and living areas.
Where the slab travels into the living area, which is slightly higher, it functions as a coffee table. "The idea is that if someone is sitting at the dining table and someone is sitting on the sofa in the living area, they actually have the same eye line," says Onur.
"We’re either cooking, sitting around the bar at the island, or at the table in the living area by the fire. It’s all very, very snug," says Onur.
The family gathers in the kitchen, which features oak cabinets, a concrete island, and brass fixtures. The backsplash is made of pink bricks hand-selected by Alix and Onur from a nearby brickyard. The mango wood pendants were purchased in a market in Bangkok.
Per Alix’s request for a warm fire next to her during meals, Onur embedded a fire-pit into the surface at the coffee table end. It is one of six fireplaces in the home. Originally slated for completion byMarch 2020, the home would have made an ideal pandemic hideout, but delays in construction meant it wasn’t finished until a full year later.
A swing hangs from one of the home’s original beams. "It was a gift from friends in New York," says Onur. "The girls spend hours on it."
Now, however, the Keçes head out of town every Friday afternoon. "With Covid, the house has become a lot more important in our lives," says Onur. "Both Alix and I grew up in suburban homes with big gardens, but our children were being raised in two of the busiest cities—New York and Paris. Seeing them discover nature is incredible. When we are in the country home, we really enjoy the downtime, relaxing without the interferences of urban life."
Project Credits:
Architecture & Design: The Refreshment Club
Construction:Valenton Service Batiment (01-43-86-16-56)
Landscape, Lighting, Interior & Cabinetry Design: The Refreshment Club
Photography: Alejandra Hauser / @lahauser
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