IN GLORIOUS COLOUR

PAINT QUEEN ANNIE SLOAN HAS TRANSFORMED HER FRENCH FARMHOUSE INTO A DECORATED HAVEN.

Paint tells a story at Annie Sloan’s French farmhouse.

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Annie Sloan’s house in Normandy, northern France, is filled to the brim with paint effects ranging from beautifully aged and patinated furniture to bright and joyful Bloomsbury-style doorways and stair risers. She is, after all, the very same Annie Sloan who singlehandedly kickstarted the chalk paint trend back in 1990, when she was working as a mural artist and restorer after studying Fine Arts at university. She disliked the paints available, so she formulated her own, and the decorative powerhouse that is Annie Sloan Chalk Paints was born.

It’s been a 30-year journey to get her French home the way she likes it, though. Australian-born Annie, who moved to the UK with her family when she was 10 years old, recalls that in 1991, when she and husband David were searching for a holiday home as a retreat from their busy life in Oxford, they struggled even to discover which houses were for sale. “It wasn’t so easy to find property in other countries,” she says. “There was no such thing as an estate agent in rural France back then – you had to contact the town council, who would let you know of any properties available in the vicinity. Then somebody who knew somebody who once lived there would drive you out. When they did eventually find somewhere to show you, it felt almost rude not to buy it!”

Thankfully, this home, parts of which date back to the 1600s, was in the perfect location, just a few hours’ drive from the ferry port, but “deep, deep in the countryside, with no neighbours for miles”. When they got inside, though, “The house was completely dilapidated,” says Annie. “It’s in the style of what in the UK we would call a longhouse, which is a farmhouse built so farmers and their animals could live together. They tend to appear in remote areas where farmers would be running self-sufficient smallholdings with chickens, geese and a few cows.”

Those animals took their toll on the fabric of the house, in particular in one of the bedrooms. “This room had clearly been where the chickens held court!” explains Annie. “It was crumbling to pieces and had been pecked terribly at the bottom. We could see it was built in the traditional French peasant mode; that is to say, using a lot of mud, straw, and cow manure. So we thought, ‘Well, we ought to try and repair this sympathetically.’

“Dino, my wonderful Albanian builder from Oxford, said, ‘I might not be French, but we have this technique in my country too, and I think I know exactly what to do.’ >

THIS PAGE AND FACING PAGE “You enter the house into the sitting room, a lovely open-plan room with rafters and an open fireplace,” says Annie. “As a family, we spend the most time here, with its walls in soft pink Chalk Paint in Antoinette and its roaring fire.” The mural above the fireplace was already there when they bought the house.

The house has two staircases, as it’s a longhouse that’s only one room deep. “It’s higgledy-piggledy, but for me, that’s a large part of the charm,” Annie says.