Villa Camille, a transmission revisited by Atelier Compostelle

For interior designers, a project is unlike any other. Each place, each house, each apartment presents its own interest, its own evolution over the years, its own history. And the treatment is necessarily different depending on the needs and desires of its occupants. Especially when the emotional aspect enters the equation. As for this magnificent renovation of an elegant house in the Cents district, in the city center of Luxembourg. Entitled Villa Camille, this creation is part of a context of house exchange between parents and children. An unusual project for Atelier Compostelle, with fairly restrictive specifications: Amandine Maroteaux, founder of the agency, and Estelle Schumacher, project manager, had the mission of completely rethinking the spaces while retaining their use, without the possibility of structural work because it is an occupied site.

Initially very closed and partitioned, the house was “open”: if the volumes were preserved, the circulation and light intake were redesigned, especially on the ground floor. The vast, preserved entrance was adorned with new custom-made wallpaper decorations reaching 6 m in height. It serves the main spaces: the family dining room, the reception lounge which itself opens onto the fireplace lounge and the reception dining room, and the kitchen via a corridor to avoid crossing the lounges. The layouts have been preserved upstairs but the uses have been modified, by the addition of an office to the master suite for example.

A huge amount of work to harmonize aesthetic codes and layouts has also been undertaken, to enhance and sometimes reproportion the volumes. The paints offer the eye a palette of shades, associated with the personalized shades of the materials used for the joinery or kitchen facades. A kitchen which is also of great importance to the owners: its layout was thought out around the piano, chosen before the start of the renovations. The marbles and ceramics – notably the table, the worktop and the splashback – have been given a new lease of life. The parquet floors were also completely sanded and oiled to promote a more natural, softer color, like the decor. A sweetness that is not the result of chance: for the client it was a question of reconciling formal receptions and intimate family time, in a setting well known to her. It’s not easy to reinvent the soul of the house in which she grew up…

And besides, why Villa “Camille”? For Vincent Van Gogh's portrait of Camille Roulin, famous little boy in a blue beret, son of a postman from Arles who was a friend of the painter. An obvious reference to childhood and a nice nod to the history of this splendid building.