See Inside a Sophisticated Farmhouse Designed by Jean-Louis Deniot

Parisian interior designer Jean-Louis Deniot worked with his sister and business partner, Virginie Deniot, to completely renovate a centuries-old French farmhouse, making it an elegant haven for the family. Surprisingly, the whole house renovation took only a year.

The brother and sister managed to work some of the original materials into the new design. Jean-Louis Deniot describes this project as “not too sophisticated, yet more sophisticated than you’d normally have in the country.”

It all started with a two-story rectangular structure, but soon enough the designer decided to extend the house’s layout by building a passage connecting it to the adjacent stable.

First of all, because the house gets so much natural light, Jean-Louis chose a dark palette for the walls and used paler fabrics to break up the darkness.

Many of the furniture pieces and fabrics were acquired by the siblings during their travels, such as the terra-cotta vase from Ibiza that is now in the living room, the Tangier rug in the library/office, and the dining area’s Brutalist C. Jeré brass lantern, which they bought at a flea market in Los Angeles.

The stable became a living room and an open kitchen, and a bedroom was turned into a library/office. The former kitchen, with its brick hearth, is now Jean-Louis’s guest room. Upstairs, below the gabled ceilings, there are three more bedrooms, two new baths, and a media room. An under-floor radiant-heating system was installed, and three dormers were built—one in the front and two in the back—to match the existing one, filling the second floor with light.