The barefoot CHATEAU becomes a summer place
The Loire estate, bought as a fixer-upper, maintains a certain relaxed grandeur for a four-generation family
Socelie`re is proof that man’s castle can also be a home. The 17th-century chateau is so down-to-earth, in fact, that all four generations of the Laviani family go shoeless when they visit in the summer: Giuseppe, 82, and his wife, Giacomina, 77, who bought the place in 1999; their children, Ferruccio, 52, an architect based in Milan who is known for designing the 2003 Bourgie lamp, among other things, and Clara, 56; Clara’s husband, Antonio Fontana, 57, and their two daughters, Marta, 30, and Giulia, 23; and Marta’s four-year-old daughter, Anita, the first great-grandchild.
The first day you’re there, Ferruccio Laviani said, ‘‘maybe you feel a little down, far from the real world. The mobile phone doesn’t work well. The internet goes jumping. The TV channels to see are just five instead of the millions. But when you start to get used to it, you begin to learn to lie down on an armchair and open a book’’.
‘‘I fall asleep on the couch while I look out the window at the blue pure sky, and feel light breaths of fresh air coming from the half-closed shutters. I go along the Vende´e River with a small rowing boat, or I find my sheep, especially the ram, Lambert, who is like a dog running to make me a party when I arrive.’’
It was not their intention to buy a chateau. They wanted a house on the Riviera, but the Coˆte d’Azur was ‘‘too expensive for what you got’’, Ferruccio Laviani remembers his father saying. So friends took them to see a fixer-upper in the Loire Valley.
‘‘When we crossed the threshold of the property the first time, we were catalysed by the beauty and proportions of the house — she was beautiful, perfect,’’ he said. ‘‘Then we started to look into details. The roofs of the towers were collapsed. The rainwater that entered had created problems with the structure of the floors. The interior was decorated in a very cheap way. Electrical and water had to be redone. Heating existed in only half the house.’’
Nevertheless, the family loved the 3,000m2 home and its nearly 8 hectares of forest, gardens and pasture. Giuseppe Laviani bought it for about 17 million baht and paid another 17 million baht to restore it.
His son oversaw the project, working with various family members who agreed on what needed to be done.
‘‘Give dignity back to the house without overdoing it,’’ as Ferruccio Laviani put it. ‘‘The main thing was to make it ours as much as possible, to feel at ease, as if it was something that had always belonged to us.’’
First, they brought in carpenters, electricians and painters from Italy. Then came the furnishings. A mix of Italian and French antiques collected over the years and a few 20th-century sofas and chairs. Some pieces were valuable, like an 18th-century Savonnerie rug, but others were from flea markets.
The humble is mixed with the high-end and ‘‘the layering creates an intimate place’’, Laviani said. ‘‘If we had furnished the house in a ‘style’, the result would be fake and showy.’’
Everyone now has a favourite room. Laviani’s is the Salotto Rosa, the former dining room he uses as a studio. His mother prefers the living room, where she does her mending on a purple sofa that sits on the Savonnerie rug.
As for Giuseppe Laviani, he likes to nap on a chaise lounge in the corner of the living room overlooking the back park, where he can keep an eye out for cows or sheep ambling by.
‘‘If the sheep are coming by, it’s because they are making a disaster and are eating up all the plants and the flowers,’’ Ferruccio Laviani said. ‘‘And my father screams.’’