A Designer’s Quest for the Perfect Seaside Home

livemint.com:

Raymond Pettibon drawing of two apes shooting the breeze hangs between a pair of alabaster sconces from the ’60s. “We use it as a lecture room," Benhamou says jokingly of the space. The house hadn’t been substantially updated in 50 years.

The couple began by traveling the stylistic backroads of Anglo-Norman art deco, researching period building materials in order to replicate them and pouncing when a pile of discarded terracotta roof tiles or locally sourced red brick turned up. “We had to redo all the windows, of course, the electricity, the plumbing," Benhamou says of the rescripted interiors, which include an expanded kitchen with double ovens and stainless-steel countertops, and sybaritic bathrooms guests can disappear into for hours. Benjamin Desprez, who, with his wife, Hélène Bréhéret, runs a stylish Paris antiques gallery, specializes in roughly chiseled tables, chairs and storage pieces by Jean Touret and other midcentury cabinetmakers.

The texture of those pieces is emotional as well as physical, and Desprez says he thinks Benhamou “first got interested in us because we are focused on natural materials and historical pieces." A Jacques Adnet cabinet in the foyer and a geometric daybed by Pierre Chapo in the living room both come from the couple’s gallery. The daybed sits companionably near a 1971 grid-pattern table by Superstudio, a radical Italian architecture collective. Its laminate top makes an excellent surface for chess.

Above it, a glowering tapestry by the artist Jack Pierson is embroidered with the words, “Like Paris in the rain on 2nd Ave." Following her own instincts across her Norman hillside, Benhamou resisted the idea of a structured garden. “I like the English way. À l’anglais," she explains.