Clare Vivier Brings SoCal Cool to a Historic French Home

A Los Angeles designer and her husband bought a 19th-century manor near the river Anille in France after searching for a place in the country. The house required major repairs, including a new roof, updated wiring, and an improved attic, so they renovated it themselves with help from a creative consultant. The renovation combined the husband’s French provincial classicism with the designer’s Southern California modernism to create a more formal, classic French feel than their Los Angeles home. Interior decisions began with selecting a palette that accounted for different French light, using toned-down, patinated, muted colors and adding bright pops of color through furnishings.

"The Los Angeles-based fashion and accessories designer Clare Vivier and her husband, Thierry, had long pined for a place in France. During family visits to his hometown of Saint-Calais, southwest of Paris, she quietly eyed a handsome 19th-century manor set on a lush patch of land along the river Anille. In 2020, they heard that the family who had owned the seemingly abandoned house for the last 50 years had put it on the market. The Viviers swiftly bought it-a dream come true, times two."

"The house was a bit ramshackle-it needed a new roof, the wiring was ancient, and the attic was, she remembers, "really decrepit." Nevertheless, they decided to undertake the renovation themselves. It wasn't an outlandish idea for two can-do aesthetes: Clare, who founded her brand Clare V. almost 20 years ago, now has more than a dozen stores across America; Thierry, a television journalist, is an adept do-it-yourselfer. For an outside point of view, they called their friend Kate Berry, a creative consultant and magazine veteran, currently the US editor of Cabana."

"Their aim was to blend Thierry's French provincial classicism with Clare's colorful SoCal modernism (laid out in her 2023 book, La Vie de Clare V.: Paris Chic/L.A. Cool) to create something "a little more formal, a little more classic French, than our LA home," Clare notes. Once the structure was sound, she and Kate began to think about the interior. First, they had to figure out the palette."

""The light in France is just so different from the light in the US-a different glow," Berry says. "So we chose more toned-down colors that are very Farrow & Ball, patinated and muted, then added bright pops of color with furnit"

Read at Architectural Digest