This Woman Recreated Provence in Her Own Backyard
The French bistro chairs on the "breakfast patio" are literally the dream.
What a way to rock the house! On her nine-acre property in Sonoma, California, designer Wendy Owen used local fieldstone to build her own French-inspired village, filled with rustic pavilions for entertaining and picturesque sheds for gardening and cooking.
Dining Room
Designer Wendy Owen made the dining table on her Sonoma property from antique salvaged beams; she slipcovered the Ron Mann Design chairs in vintage burlap grain sacks. A grouping of five chandeliers illuminates the table.
Dining Pavilion
Owen created six stone buildings inspired by ones she saw in Provence. Outside the ivy-clad dining pavilion, an antique stone sink from France was repurposed as a fountain, and a needlepoint chair from a consignment store is covered in live moss.
Outdoor Kitchen
"This is not a fancy, decked-out kitchen: The counter is a slab of oak, the sink is a French stone bowl and the mossy burl of the tree outside the window is the perfect piece of art," says Owen. She embellished a simple steel-tube chandelier with grapevines, ivy and live moss.
Patio
The breakfast patio is set with French café chairs and a stone table. The dishes are by Astier de Villatte.
Terrace
Owen's master bedroom faces a stone terrace where a small pond encircles a wall covered in creeping fig. For cuttings, she adores her Limelight hydrangeas: "They turn chartreuse in summer, so I painted the ball pillows to match."
Fountain
Owen used water channels to create a scenic fountain.
Potting Shed
An old garden trowel serves as the door knocker on the potting shed. Owen stores vintage terra-cotta pots, watering cans and plant bulbs in the fieldstone building. "It's also a lovely place to have girlfriends over for tea," she adds. The grounds are covered in shrub oaks, century-old olive trees and Provençal lavender. "It's not the easiest to tend," she says of the latter, "but it's the most beautiful and fragrant."
Lounge Pavilion
"If we had a pool, this would be the cabana," Owen says of the three-sided lounge pavilion, which was inspired by an outdoor room she saw in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. To complement 100-year-old hand-hewn beams from the Midwest, Owen crafted a huge "jigsaw puzzle–style" wooden table (she plants succulents in the mortise holes). She made the chandeliers out of beehives. The pillows, felted ball cushions and hand-painted throw are by Wendy Owen Design.
The Designer
Owen is seated on a hemp-covered banquette made of hefty cinder blocks and concrete. "When I go, it will stay," jokes the designer, who sells antiques and her own furniture line in her shop at Sienna Antiques in Petaluma. Read more about her inspiration for this property here.
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This story originally appeared in the May 2017 issue of House Beautiful.
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