Casa Keçe

The Vexin is a quiet, protected park of woods, valleys and slow rivers on the northern edge of the Paris region, large enough to feel genuinely rural while sitting only about an hour from the city. Its villages are old and unhurried, its lanes good for walking, cycling and riding, and the country cooking carries a little of both Burgundy and Normandy. Van Gogh spent his last days painting at Auvers-sur-Oise, just along the valley, and the Seine loops past the château at La Roche-Guyon nearby. Casa Keçe sits in this forest, in the village of Haravilliers.

The house was a nineteenth-century barn and an abandoned farmhouse, with a scatter of old outbuildings, which the Paris design studio The Refreshment Club bought and rebuilt as their own family home. Led by the architect Onur Keçe and Alix Petit, who founded the fashion label Heimstone, they kept the original beams and framework and reworked the inside in poured concrete and soft Venetian plaster, letting the rooms ramble across several levels. The old hay barn is now the heart of the house, a tall room under a twenty-foot ceiling with a long pink concrete table built for sharing meals. A dozen fireplaces, hand-painted tiles, silk and satin curtains made by Alix, and pieces by the likes of B&B Italia and Knoll give each room its own quiet colour. Outside there are two guest suites, a greenhouse, a wood-fired Nordic bath under the pines, a pizza oven and a pétanque court.