The farmhouse had been in the same family since before anyone could date it properly, and had been altered so many times that the plan made no sense. Rooms opened into rooms. A staircase arrived in the middle of a bedroom. Nothing matched, and the whole thing was entirely coherent.
A week there is a useful corrective to everything written about French interiors, this journal included.
The shutters do the decorating
Every room was controlled by its shutters, and they were adjusted several times a day. Closed against the heat by ten, opened a crack at four, thrown back in the evening.
The effect is that the rooms are never the same twice, and they spend much of the day in a kind of striped half-light that no lighting scheme can reproduce. The walls were plain because they did not need to be anything else. The light was the pattern.
Nothing had been bought as a set
The kitchen had a stone sink, a long table of indeterminate age, eight chairs of which no two were identical, and a dresser that had clearly been built for a different wall.
It looked better than any styled version of the same room, and the reason was simply time. Each object had arrived on its own and been kept because it worked. There was no scheme to detect because there had never been one.
Everything was repairable
A chair with a broken rush seat sat by the back door waiting to be dealt with, not thrown out. The table had been scrubbed so often the grain stood proud. A cracked tile in the hall had been grouted rather than lifted.
None of this was precious. It was economical, and the aesthetic everyone now pays for is a side effect of a household that could not afford to replace things.
The colours were outside
Indoors was limewash, bare timber and terracotta, which is to say almost no colour at all. The colour was the courtyard, the olive leaves, the sky through an open door.
This is the part most often reversed in imitation. The palette gets brought inside and applied to the walls, and then the room has to compete with its own view.
What travelled home
Two things, in the end. Shut the light out during the brightest part of the day and let it back in later, even in a climate that does not demand it. And stop finishing rooms.
The farmhouse was not finished. It had simply been lived in attentively for a very long time, which turns out to be a different project altogether.
