Now that is the way you modernise a French château

That is the newest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s sequence spotlighting intriguing, progressive and industry-leading inside design.

For a masterclass in renovating a historic property with out stripping it of its identification, look to this transformation of a Nineteenth-century looking property within the Sologne area, close to the Loire Valley. Architect and designer Katja Pargger was tasked in 2020 with restoring a Napoléon III-era château – a quintessential château Solognot, the normal rural manor homes native to central France – in addition to reimagining a number of outbuildings, together with a separate visitor inn. The encircling panorama was concurrently reworked by Louis Benech, the designer behind Paris’s Jardin des Tuileries.

The central problem of a renovation of this scale and pedigree lay in preserving the château’s classical French language. To the unique lime-rendered façades, hand-made brickwork and terracotta roofs, Pargger added a pair of black wrought-iron conservatories. Positioned symmetrically, they body the constructing with out disrupting its silhouette, whereas creating mild transitions between the home and the encircling forest and meadows.

Inside, Pargger adopts a Bauhaus-inspired strategy, treating structure, furnishings and objects as elements of a single, cohesive system. Areas are formed by clear geometric types and tactile supplies corresponding to uncooked wooden, lacquer, stone, lime and leather-based. Supplies are deliberately left unfinished – aged wooden, woven textiles, pure stone – reinforcing the understated sophistication related to rural French manor homes.

All through the interiors, historic and modern references are layered with confidence: checkerboard flooring, Briare enamel tiles, tapestries and artworks drawn from totally different eras and geographies. This strategy not solely brings the previous into dialogue with the current, but in addition lends the home a richly lived-in high quality, as if it has developed organically over generations relatively than emerged totally shaped from a current renovation.

Within the visitor inn, Pargger leans into the constructing’s beneficiant volumes, flooding the interiors with daylight by way of skylights and horizontal home windows. Every room balances crisp architectural strains with heat wooden panelling and bespoke delicate furnishings, creating areas that really feel each open and intimate. Customized-designed components – parchment bedside lamps, mirrored nightstands, velvet headboards – are complemented by surprising gestures, corresponding to a latex kimono displayed on a Nineteenth-century Japanese stand.

The ambiance recollects Jean Renoir’s The Guidelines of the Recreation (1939), set on a Sologne property. Renoir resists presenting it as an awe-inspiring palace; as an alternative, he movies it as a porous home house threaded with doorways, corridors, staircases and balconies – an structure that enables folks to overhear, move by way of and observe each other.

This challenge demonstrates a sensitivity to historical past with out lapsing into pastiche. Together with her fastidiously judged interventions, Pargger has crafted a spot the place, like in The Guidelines of the Recreation, life can unfold organically.

Recreate the temper