Property in France: a Lutyens-inspired Alpine retreat

By Zoe Dare Hall 410PM GMT nineteen March 2010

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Previous of Images Next A head for Ned Le�Ch�teau is full of equipment and seat done to Sir Edwin Lutyens"s designs Wall treatments relate Sir Edwin Lutyens"s ideas

The work of the designer Sir Edwin Lutyens takes majority forms and spans majority locations, from quirky exemplary seat designs and English nation houses, to branch point fight memorials and staggering open buildings in New Delhi.

But less well known is the 16th-century château in the ancestral ski encampment of Samoëns, in Frances Haute Savoie region, that Lutyenss grand-daughter has done in to a reverence to her eminent ancestors ideas and designs.

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"Baronial with a brew of exemplary and medieval features" is how Candia Lutyens describes Le Château, that is on sale for €3.5 million (�3.2 million). She and her husband, Paul Peterson, 53, who is additionally an architect, paid for it as a family home in 2006 and outlayed dual years branch it from an infrequently organised house, whose taste had been inexperienced for 35 years, in to a showcase for Lutyenss designs.

"I assimilate how he used space, colours and paint and the games he played with geometry in his furniture, utilizing joining circles and circles inside of block or triangles, so we longed for to spin this residence in to a small square of Lutyens in the Alps," says Candia, who was a City merchant prior to relocating to Samoëns, where she runs her online association Lutyens Furniture, creation reproductions of her grandfathers designs.

The mid-1500s château, a 10-minute travel from the ski slopes that bond with Frances greatest ski domain, the Grand Massif, was built from the rubble of a circuitously estate house, razed by Swiss invaders.

Home to princes, dukes and cardinals over the centuries, the château set on 3 floors, each wider than the one next and heading onto a apart harvesting machine of grassed area has regularly been the majority critical residence in the village.

It is additionally right away additionally the majority idiosyncratic, ornate with strange Lutyens furniture, together with a Mercury Ball candelabrum in the vital room, an early Arts and Crafts dais and table chair, and pattern facilities via that give a true curtsy to the architects dainty eye.

"The residence has smashing three-feet walls, and illusory slab window and doorway surrounds, but the rest of the interior we treated with colour as a vacant board when we arrived," says Candia, who incited the strange 4 immeasurable bedrooms and dual large bathrooms in to eight ensuite bedrooms, together with dual in the tower.

Out went the swirly ceilings, too, transposed with well-spoken smear flashy with cornices, roof roses and a unsettled paint finish "to have it see similar to it had regularly been there".

Lutyens favourite his paint tricks, as recreated in Candias dining room, where she has lonesome black walls with terracotta red, burnished it so that the black shows through, afterwards waxed it to give a silky sheen.

The small vaulted chapel, right away the familys celebration of the mass room, has muralled walls that show the couples young kids Robert, right away 20, and Lili, eighteen and their dog relaxing in the internal towering scenery.

And there is a array of 3 interconnecting bedrooms where the colour palette subtly changes from light immature in the grave accepting room to some-more pale greens burnished with coppery brownish-red in the vital room to darker hues in the radio room, "like a Vermeer painting, giving the sense when you mount at one finish that the space is far bigger than it unequivocally is", Candia says.

Lutyens hated patterns, quite chintz, and wasnt as well penetrating on fabrics either, so fate are kept to a smallest and building rugs are neutral in the château.

Its a family home initial and foremost. "The bedrooms are unsentimental and complicated and the kitchen is the really centre of the house, with inapt slab work surfaces complementing the slab window frames," Candia says.

But it additionally serves as a undiluted muster space for Lutyenss designs, with majority of Candias clients invited to stay at the residence so they can experience vital between the furniture.

Candia and Paul wish to stay locally, but they are downsizing to concentration on their seat business. Candia envisages it will possibly be a Lutyens fan who buys the château (the fixtures and fittings, and a little of the furniture, are "negotiable") or, since the an hour from Geneva "and 3 hours from Canary Wharf", it could be any one who fancies a second home for prolonged ski weekends.

"It would have a good boutique hotel, but it additionally suits year-round living. Samoëns becomes a stadium for skiers in winter, but there is far some-more to do here in summer, from towering biking in the inhabitant play ground on the doorstep to white-water rafting or golf in circuitously Flaine," she says. "Its a really outdoor hold up here."

And when the châteaus new owners does wish to shelter indoors from a day outlayed in the mountains, there are couple of some-more charming spaces in whichto collapse.

Le Château is on sale by Erna Low for �3.2 million. Contact www.ernalowproperty.co.uk; 020 7590 1624 for details.www.lutyens-furniture.com