Your family and your business, Berdoulat, both live under the same roof in Bath. What’s special about living and working in this city?
Bath is famous for its relentless Georgian architecture. I keep going on about “visual diet”. While the old adage ‘you are what you eat’ is true, one’s visual diet is also hugely important. There is a reason why the golden ratio (the mathematical proportion of roughly 1:6, deemed to denote aesthetic harmony) feels right, and why an 18th-century sash window and its grid of panes set within a beautifully proportioned façade is pleasing first to the eye, and then to the body when inside the building. As Leonardo da Vinci depicted in his Vitruvian Man, all relate to the human form. Ditto in nature, where, from pinecones to galaxies, we humans find inner happiness, delight and wonder in the perfectly proportioned spirals that plot Fibonacci’s sequence of numbers – the calculations of the 12th-century Italian mathematician that are repeated throughout the natural world.
I love living immersed in this beautiful city, not only for the architecture but the proximity to beautiful countryside too – the city is surrounded by seven hills, the valleys of each all have their own character. We are only 15 minutes walk to a field with cows, despite being fairly central, which is so liberating.
You painstakingly restored this beautiful old building to reflect its former glory and honour those who have sold their wares here before you. Are you a nostalgic person and how, as an interior designer, do you find the balance between old and new?
I am deeply nostalgic. In a way I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I deplore the way in which the vast majority of buildings are made and furnished nowadays. I love to use and really celebrate traditional materials and techniques in my projects and in the furniture we sell at Berdoulat. The balance struck between old and new is straightforward really, in that it’s simply doing things traditionally anew. I love introducing new elements in to a period building, in such a way that they can be read as honest new additions. In so doing, one is adding a chapter to the building’s story. The fabric of the newly added material will patinate gradually over time, and become part of the building’s identity.
Your parent’s home in France clearly had a big influence on your chosen career path. What about those memories and that home is most present in your interior design work?
Indeed, Berodulat is the name of an 18th century farmhouse where I grew up. My parents bought the 18th-century ruin, nestled in a beautiful valley in the Armagnac region, when I was in the womb. As teachers they were financially poor but time rich, with nearly 40 per cent of the year as holiday. Every second of each holiday throughout my childhood, as well as a couple of sabbatical years they took, was spent at Berdoulat, and as a family we restored the place over the course of 20 years. I say, ‘as a family’ because not only did we live on site, but we were also the contractors, and my father learned how to plumb, wire, render, roof, tile – you name it – from scratch. He in turn taught me and my siblings to do the same, and I fondly remember, aged eight, scrubbing clean hundreds of 18th-century tiles and ferrying them through the building in a wheelbarrow. After an exhausting day, my mother placed a 10 franc coin into my blistered hand, and I felt very pleased with myself. Beyond the satisfaction of hard work rewarded, I was immensely proud to see that floor being laid over the following days and know that I had contributed to it. I could sense the building responding too, and so began a conversation with buildings, their form and the materials used in their construction, that I continue to enjoy on a daily basis. My parents’ approach to restoration was careful and informed. They would research from which nearby quarries to source sands of varying colours in order to get exactly the correct recipe for lime render. They even went so far as to hang pictures using handmade period appropriate nails. A local dealer supplied us with all the right ingredients, from firedogs to escutcheons. All this touched something deep inside me and fuelled a passion for period buildings, how to restore them with real love, and curate within them objects and decoration. Berdoulat is where it all began, and I owe so much to my parents, who taught me how to respond to architecture, appreciate detail and enjoy a healthy visual diet.
One of the things we share is the rollercoaster experience of being shopkeepers. What do you and your wife love most about it?
We love the way in which keeping shop roots us in the community. However clichéd this may sound, when we opened the doors following a rigorous four-and-a-half-year restoration of the building, we immediately realised that the shop didn’t really belong to us, it belonged to the wider community. We’d focussed so hard on restoring the fabric of the building, but inadvertently had also restored the spirit of the place. This is what we are most proud of. Whenever the door opens to the chime of a little bell, or when the place is heaving with people at one of our events, we can sense the building itself enjoying being used once more.
You have become one of Original Fibre’s most loyal and discerning customers. We particularly love your colour choices. Does clothing bring you joy or do you think of it in a more utilitarian way?
It brings me a great deal of joy. When you put on a favourite garment and it fits so well it feels like an extension of yourself, it’s comforting. The colours of your clothes are predominantly earthy and natural feeling, perfectly reflecting the fibres they’re made from. This gives them a wholesome and honest character, which I love. I’d say a good 80 percent of my daily wardrobe is Original Fibres. If you made pants and socks I’d probably wear them too!
Next March, your first book - The House Rules (Quadrille) - will be published. How would you describe the experience of writing it?
Very very time consuming! I will never look at a book the same way again now having experienced the hard work and dedication required to make one. I have found the whole experience particularly fascinating. A good chunk of the book is autobiographical, and required me to look back over my early years and in so doing discover what it was that influenced and forged me as a designer. Rather like how I imagine it might be talking to a psychoanalyst, this process of revisiting my past really helped me work out what my true feelings are towards a design aesthetic and approach.
Beyond the writing of the book, shooting the various spaces featured was also a rewarding experience. I returned to buildings I had not seen for years, and it was lovely to see them lived in, acquiring patina, and the scuffs and scars of family life. I love how when photographing an interior one has to think about the same concepts as when the interior is first conceived: light, flow (how one passes through the image), composition, colour. Whilst the space is the same, and the processes so similar, the camera facilitates another work to emerge from it.
I love books as sculptural objects, and it was important that the physical book as an entity should reflect the work it contained, become a work itself, and feel like a natural progression of some sort. Conceiving it, from the marble endpapers I designed, through to the layout, deciding on the progression of images, the cloth binding, the tone of the title gilding – was such a joy.
Lastly, for anyone who might be about to redesign the room that they’re sitting in as they read this interview: what matters most?
Well the book I have written is called “The House Rules”, which could be read as the title for a book of directives, and it may illustrate some rules you already follow or might consider adopting, but moreover it refers to our mantra as a practice: ‘the building is the client’. As such, the design of any added architectural detail or interior should be a direct response to its history, fabric, setting and spirit. Honesty is key, and whatever is introduced or whatever work carried out must be in harmony with, and the correct approach for, the host building. When it comes to what’s then housed within, there’s no room for something simply because it’s ‘on trend’. The best spaces invariably feel like they’ve always been there or have come together organically over time.
Quick Fire Five
Favourite restaurant: OAK restaurant in Bath. It’s vegetarian (unlike me), and they somehow manage to make local seasonal vegetables the protagonist of the dish. Every time I go I worry I will be disappointed, and every time (and it’s been 15 years now), I am amazed with every mouthful, at the combination of flavours and textures. Quite simply wonderful! Another fave I must mention is Landrace Upstairs. Small plates, seasonal, never fails to impress.
Favourite holiday destination: South West France, which is my childhood home. I love revisiting memories and making new ones with my family.
Prize possession: A jar of 18th-century dust harvested from the ceiling of a canopy bed. It is the most beautiful mauvey grey. It was given to me by dear French friends who run an amazing antiques shop.
Biggest indulgence: Aside from Original Fibres sprees, I think the time I feel luckiest and most special, is when I am able to hold my wife’s hand and spend the day with her, away from the non-stop work and family life.
