The grand salon of a nineteenth-century château outside Tours, brought back into use as a wedding and banqueting room.
Almost everything permanent in this room was already there. Gilded boiserie frames the walls, painted overdoors sit above the mirrors, and the ceiling carries a rococo scheme in rose and blue that had survived under a layer of distemper. Maison Levaux’s work was conservation plus a small number of contemporary insertions, and the interest of the project is entirely in where those insertions were placed.
The two crystal chandeliers were the difficulty. They are original, they are correct, and they light the ceiling rather than the tables, which made evening service unworkable. Rather than replace them or add track, the studio hung two oversized drum shades in raw silk directly over them, concealing the fitting from below and pushing the light down onto the linen. The gesture is blunt, and it is meant to be. Seen from the door, two pale cylinders float in the middle of a gilded room and read unmistakably as an addition rather than a pastiche.
Everything else is soft. Tables are round, dressed in blush washed linen that reaches the floor, with gold candlesticks, low peony and ranunculus arrangements, and gold-rimmed charger plates. Sage silk curtains were rewoven to the original pattern by a mill in Lyon and hang on the existing poles. The parquet de Versailles was lifted, repaired and relaid by hand.
Chairs are stacking, upholstered in the same blush, and stored off-site. The room can be cleared to bare parquet in ninety minutes.
The jury respected the restoration work, which is careful and well documented, and enjoyed the nerve of the drum shades. It placed the project in Honorable Mention because the design content, as distinct from the conservation content, is limited to that single move. Several jurors also questioned whether the shades should have been raw silk rather than something that declared itself more clearly as new.
Maison Levaux is a Tours-based practice working on historic properties in the Loire, founded in 1998 by Béatrice Levaux and now run with her daughter Camille. The office holds French heritage accreditation and splits its work between private châteaux and municipal buildings. It employs two full-time gilders. The studio's position on contemporary insertion is that additions should be reversible and visible, a rule it applies more strictly than most of its peers. Camille Levaux leads the contemporary work and has pushed the office toward commissioning new pieces rather than sourcing period reproductions. The practice takes three or four projects a year and typically spends two of those years on site.