Using French Toille In Decorating A Room

Photo: Nathan Kirkman

Some of us aren't sure what we want until we find it, but when we do, the proverbial lightbulb goes on. Beth Gross invokes this imagery whenever she tells the tale of how she and her husband, Randy, found their new home.

The story starts five years ago, when the couple was living in a sleek contemporary house filled with equally sleek furnishings. They had bought it when their children, Jordan and Aliza, were just starting school, but 15 years later, Beth was ready for a change. "I had nothing definite in mind when we decided to move, but my taste had matured, and I was ready for a traditional architectural style and a more eclectic and artistic interior," she says.

Photo: Nathan Kirkman

During months of house-hunting, nothing lit her bulb until she saw a "remarkable empty lot on a lakeside street" that came with equally "remarkable building plans for a David Adler–inspired house," Beth gushes. Designed by Chicago architect Gregory Maire, the home was informed by Adler's acclaimed 1914 grand French manor for Carolyn Morse Ely in nearby Lake Bluff, Illinois, which in turn was based on the world-renowned Pavillon de la Lanterne built in 1787 at Versailles. The beauty and pedigree of the project prompted a bulb-worthy moment for Beth, and the couple bought the soon-to-be-built home within days. It also rekindled her Francophilia, ignited years earlier, when she studied French in school.

"I knew I was really in for it, because we'd need all new furniture," teases Randy, who, it turned out, was nearly correct.

From the outside, the historically informed architecture of this 21st-century home makes it "look like it's been there since Adler's day. No one ever suspects it's new," Beth notes. This fueled her determination to be "true to Adler's spirit on the inside too." As it happens, Adler was a Francophile himself and is said to have crafted his most intriguing interiors with the help of his younger sister, the legendary decorator Frances Elkins. "They did their best work together because she was always pushing the envelope, and he was a discriminating editor who tempered her," says Stephen Salny, the author of monographs on both designers. Elkins was also the "first American to bring the work of her contemporaries Jean-Michel Frank and the Giacometti brothers to the United States," Salny points out.

Taking their cues from the famed brother-sister act, designers Harriet Robinson and Eric Ceputis (then colleagues at Harvin Associates) came up with the idea of using the Adler/Elkins strategy—with a twist. "We wanted to respect Beth's interest in Adler and at the same time bring in things that would say something new. So we focused on seminal furnishings by contemporary French designers and mixed them with vintage pieces," Ceputis explains. Robinson notes that this tactic required restraint because "you want to pick pieces that forge exactly the right creative tension." Yet she also acknowledges that Beth was an ideal candidate for the challenge: "She covets unique things, knows exactly what she likes when she sees it and doesn't shilly-shally."

Furnishing the house was surprisingly quick because "we were all really of a like mind," Beth marvels. Many of the pieces with a contemporary French provenance, by the likes of Andrée Putman, Christian Astuguevieille, Christian Liaigre and Hervé van der Straeten, were found at furniture showrooms in Chicago and New York, while most of the singular vintage pieces, such as the occasional table of outstretched arms in the master bedroom and the living room's spidery gilded chair (re-covered with a downy skin salvaged from a pillow), were found at Pavilion, a local store specializing in 20th-century French wares.

Click here to see the gallery for "A French-inspired Home".

Photo: Nathan Kirkman

But Beth was also proactive. A visit with Randy to Ladurée, the iconic tearoom in Paris, known for its macaroons and pale pistachio packaging, inspired the color of the kitchen cabinets. "She gave us the shop's ribbon and asked us to match it," Ceputis laughs. Beth also tracked a pair of bijou bronze tables she saw in a magazine that were made by French artist Hubert Le Gall to the Parisian gallery Avant-Scène and bought them for the living room. And when a dazzling rope chair by the Brazilian Campana brothers turned up at a local sample sale for half-price, she made an on-the-spot exception to provenance and bought it for the bedroom.

Through the process, Beth discovered the merits of change to keep things current: She recently purchased Arik Levy's 2008 Log 206 table to replace a gilt-and-glass nesting trio in the living room. "It's edgier," Beth observes, "and Levy lives in Paris."

Key to the Style

• Ceputis and Robinson kept the editing tight: They chose idiosyncratic furniture and gave it plenty of room to shine, using fewer pieces and avoiding teeming tableaux.
• Large-scale pieces with presence inhabit the rooms without making them feel overfurnished.
• With the exception of chairs in the dining room and kitchen, furniture is "mismatched," as if it had been assembled over time rather than acquired all at once.
• To balance scale and vary the visual landscape, the designers combined curves with straight lines, the bulky with the buoyant.
• The palette was designed to create cohesion between the rooms: Green and taupes with a green cast appear in every room; even the bronze drapes in the living and dining rooms have a green undertone.
• Staying true to the room as a visual whole, the Grosses don't add furniture; they replace it. When Beth fell in love with a table by Arik Levy, she deaccessioned glass nesting tables.

Click here to see the gallery for "A French-inspired Home."

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