An 18th-century French townhouse rendered in painterly tones by the founders of Antoinette Poisson

‘Our first impression of the house was that it’s very special,’ notes Jean-Baptiste Martin – paper conservator and co-founder of Parisian design studio Antoinette Poisson – of his Brittany house. ‘Port Louis is a very small town, but extremely well preserved. Unlike the big cities that were mostly destroyed during the war, you have all these 18th-century buildings that are still intact.’

One of these extraordinary houses is Maison Lescop. Built in 1740, the house was named after a merchant working for the French East India Company, one of many seafarers who built cottages along Brittany’s coastline. ‘We heard about this house through a client of ours in Paris. She came to talk to us in our rue Saint-Sabin shop and said, “You must visit Port Louis. There’s the most perfect house there that is going up for sale soon.”’ Mostly, Jean-Baptiste explains, she was ‘concerned about who would buy it. She didn’t want someone to paint everything white and rip out the floor.’

Intrigued, Jean-Baptiste and Antoinette Poisson co-founder Vincent Farelly took the three hour train from their base in Paris to visit the town that had once been the centre of France's decorative goods trade. Arriving in Port Louis, the paper conservators were met by a smart blue-shuttered Breton townhouse, its stone façade in keeping with the rest of the coastal town. ‘It’s not a big house, the rooms are small but charming. We were immediately impressed. It’s very rare to find an interior that’s still in the 18th-century aspect – and remained almost untouched since,' says Jean-Baptiste.

With the Covid-19 quarantine looming, Jean-Baptiste and Vincent wanted to visit the house one more time before committing to it. ‘The lockdown order began at midnight that night, so we raced down to Port Louis.’ There, they hashed out the details of the sale before retreating to their apartment in Paris. It wasn’t until late December that they could actually move in.

Above all, patience was the magic ingredient in this project. The duo were almost cellular in their level of detail and their excavation of the house’s history. ‘We didn’t start straight away, we took time to understand the house because we wanted to keep every original thing–we didn’t remove anything,’ he explains. This wasn’t just an exercise in staying faithful to the house’s past, but in finding cues for its future too: ‘We scratched little corners of the walls with a scalpel to reveal all the different layers of paint.’ In some places, it was four layers deep. ‘We really wanted to understand the story of the house. As different layers of paint appeared we learnt more and more about it. When we reached what we deemed was the first layer, we colour matched it as closely as we could, and painted the room in that colour,’ Jean-Baptiste details.

In the main salon, that bottom layer was a rich green. Building out the scheme from there, they ‘mixed in Antoinette Poisson wallpapers and textiles.’ For them, the house became a playground for their papers and patterns. ‘Where we didn’t feel our papers were suited properly, we hung them temporarily with pins. Even we want to change them sometimes!’

Read More

The Parisian paper conservators at Antoinette Poisson are turning wallpaper into art

Most of the structural renovation was undertaken on the ground floor, where the duo were keen to reverse changes made to the house in the 1950s. ‘The people who lived here in that decade cared mostly about comfort it seems. They wanted a car and a boat garage to store their vehicles in the winter,’ explains Jean-Baptiste. Naturally, that garage had to go. ‘They had destroyed a room to create this garage, so we reconstructed the original wall, put back the original window, and replicated the wood panelling that we found in other rooms.’