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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

“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

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.

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.

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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Outside Paris, a 19th-Century House Conceals a Minimalist Tableau Rich With Color