French Interior Inspo
French Interior Inspo
12.8.19
An Idyllic summer holiday in the french countryside, with more than enough interior inspo to keep suna director, Rebecca hunt, entertained for weeks!
“I returned recently from a two week stint in the French Countryside, staying in a delightfully rural Airbnb French stone-built farmhouse avec pool, surrounded on all sides by blooming sunflower fields, living the dream that we had envisaged when we booked. Dangling warm toes in cool water for days on end, lazing around in the shade of apple trees catching up on piles of books, browsing round French markets, filling our bags with nectarines and olives, melons and Milka. I even managed to get my painting gear out, throwing some acrylics at a couple of little canvases (whilst trying to ignore the children spoiling the peace and quiet with their water gun, snorkel and inflatable flamingo shenanigans).”
“I am not sure if our budget has just improved over the years, hence the quality of the property on this particular break, or if Airbnb has raised the game of French holiday rentals. We have stayed in our fair share of gites and cottages in France, looking forward to living the dream, only to be confronted with a creaky, uncomfy rattan sofa, flimsy beds with polyester sheets, and a kitchen that could be descried as ‘sparsely kitted out’ at best, alongside a bathroom that heralded 1940’s plumbing as ‘modern’.
The ‘browse before you buy’ approach of Airbnb has meant that you can look into every nook and cranny of a property before you book it, so the ones that have good images of a beautiful property presumably get more response in the booking conversion game. It’s like Rightmove for property addicts, only in the case of Airbnb you can actually afford to, temporarily at least, live in the home.
That led onto me thinking about how holiday home owners kit out their properties (aka how I would do up my holiday home!), and how these interiors may reflect a national ‘style’. In my ‘next-year-Rodney-we’ll-be-millionaires’ dream future (a small step on from ‘when-I-grow-up’) I will own a veritable portfolio of properties, holiday rentals, each one of which I can stay in for a month or two a year, satisfying my curious urge to live everywhere at least once in my life. I’ll have one in each of a few bustling European cities, one at the top of a mountain, one by the sea, one on a remote island that takes hours to travel to by boat, one with a pool, one with a hot tub, and maybe one with very little at all (for those monastic moments that require peace, quiet and a book). I even quite fancy a beach hut, I have a Pinterest board for how I will do that up too.
My ‘when-I-grow-up’ Chateau in France will personify a contemporary French interior style. Pared back simplicity, a cleanness of style, a purity of design. Shabby whitewashed walls with select antique furniture. Period architectural detail against stone slab floors. White voiles wafting in the breeze at tall shuttered windows. Rich parquet floors blanketed in lush, rich rugs. Crisp linen on deep, welcoming mattresses.
That kind of shabby chic interior style that featured in Villenelle’s Parisian apartment in Killing Eve….”
“….Or maybe with a bit of English eccentricity thrown in for good measure, a la The King’s Speech therapy studio (there are Pinterest boards dedicated solely to the walls in this room or google ‘kings speech interiors’ and you get oodles of images of the beautiful expansive film set with the single sofa set against the layered, textured wall, remember it now?).”
“This thought process led me, inevitably of course, to Instagram, where with a little help from my friends and co-workers, I have pulled together ten of the nicest, most beautiful feeds that typify this French classic simplicity of interior style for me….prepare to lose yourself down the Insta-Rabbit-Hole….
Enjoy!”
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