MOVEABLE FEAST
After two years of work, a former abandoned bar and restaurant have been transformed into a welcoming home – all thanks to the sheer willpower and clever creativity of its owners
FABRICE and Audrey were having a cup of coffee at a local cafe when, quite by chance, they first found out about the place they now call home. “Actually, we were not looking for this type of property and not in this neighbourhood either,” says Fabrice. “Then we had a little chat with the cafe manager and learned that the bar next door, adjoining La Familia (a ’30s cinema theatre) was for sale.”
The couple had intended to buy a flat, but ended up with a 220m² living space that needed a full renovation. The place was such a squalid disaster that even the estate agent tried to dissuade them from buying it.
But now, after two years of construction, many sleepless nights and plenty of old-fashioned hard work, Fabrice and Audrey are very much enjoying life in their new home and are happy to show us around.
After they sold their previous flat more quickly than they had expected, they settled in the house at an early stage – when it was just a basic shell. The place had no partition walls; it was basically an empty box covered with plasterboards. There was no plaster on the walls and no glass in the windows.
So began a year of indoor camping and construction work to put in the kitchen, two bathrooms, the hall and the mezzanine floor, as well as do all the finishing works and lay out what is now a delightful courtyard.
“We started with the bedroom upstairs and the bathroom so we could live on the premises, in quite a rudimentary way at first. There was no heating and the windows were closed with tarpaulins,” Fabrice says. “Luckily we have some friends living nearby. We ate all our meals at their place. They’d shout to us ‘Dinner is ready!’ and we’d stop working and go and sit at their table.”
Fabrice and Audrey have recently been putting the final touches to the decoration. “And this is sheer happiness,” he says. As they moved from a space that was just 59m² in size to one that is more than 200m², their existing furniture looked ridiculous in the new context.
They changed most of it, either buying at second-hand markets or browsing the internet for bargains. Fabrice also made some pieces of furniture himself, such as the kitchen island and the shelves in the living room, for which he recycled wood from the bar that had previously occupied the premises.
Their home is a real personal museum with a diverse collection of curiosities, paintings and other eclectic objects on display.
Many of these were inherited from Fabrice’s family home, which was recently sold. His family had been living there since 1690 and, over the generations, had accumulated a large number of small treasures. They include a tennis racket that belonged to his grandmother (who was an artist in the ’20s), a cryptic painting that belonged to a forebear who was a freemason, and a map that belonged to another of his forebears who worked as a master mariner. In this house, all the objects have a story to tell.
Only one wall, just down the stairs, has been left raw in memory of the way the place used to be. And the kitchen island now stands where the original bar was situated – appropriately, it’s where Fabrice and Audrey’s friends regularly share improvised dinners with the couple, enjoying their excellent cooking.