I did not discover French design in a magazine. I grew up in it.
Before Chicago, before this studio, there was Paris, the city where I spent my earliest years, where the rhythm of daily life was shaped by l'art de vivre: the belief that even ordinary habits deserve to be beautiful. A meal lingers longer when the table is set with care. A morning feels different when there are fresh flowers from the market, not the florist. This is not an aesthetic I studied. It is one I was raised inside of.
That distinction matters, because French country design has become a look, pinned, packaged, and repeated until it says very little. What I offer my clients is not the look. It is the sensibility underneath it.
Chicago has no shortage of interiors borrowing from Paris. Most of it reaches for 1930s Parisian apartment glamour: lacquer, mirror, gilt, drama. Beautiful in its own right, but that is not what I do.
French country lives somewhere quieter: the provinces, not the boulevard. It is a limewashed wall instead of a lacquered one. A hand-forged iron hinge instead of polished brass. Linen that softens with age instead of silk that demands protection. Terracotta warmed by decades of sun. An antique with a story, placed imperfectly, rather than a matched set placed precisely.
Where Parisian glamour performs, French country lives in. It is built for the people actually inside the house, not for the photograph.
A house filled with pieces gathered over years, a market find in Provence, an inherited chair reupholstered rather than replaced, ages the way a life does. It does not go out of style, because it was never chasing one. That is the promise I make to clients who want their home to feel less like a finished project and more like a place that already has history, even on the day we hand over the keys.
This is the thread that runs through every home I design: not an imported look, but a lived-in way of being at home, brought here, faithfully, from where I first learned it.
