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"Timothy Corrigan Renovates Ch\u00E2teau du Grand-Luc\u00E9 in the Loire Valley\nThe AD100 designer's spectacular restoration of his 18th-century estate in France's Loire Valley\n\"Renovation in France is always a tricky thing,\" explains AD100 interior designer Timothy Corrigan, \"particularly when you have a building like this, which is a national landmark. Every aspect of the property is listed\u2014every tree, every stone, every bit of the building.\"\n\"The French government told me that each tree needed to be inventoried on the property,\" Corrigan says. \"To this day, there's a metal tag that counts every one on the property.\" Moreover, any new trees planted on the grounds had to be approved to ensure that they would have been found in the region at the time of the ch\u00E2teau's construction.\n\"The Grand Salon might have been the most intimidating room in the house to design,\" notes Corrigan. The room features 22-foot ceilings, limestone floors, and carved boiserie. \"It would have been very easy to design the room in true 18th-century style, with little spindly gold chairs and not a lot of places to sit.\"\nCorrigan departed from the period French style to create a much looser environment in the salon. He filled the space with comfortable upholstered furniture that invites lounging. \"When you're in that room, it's really about hanging out with friends,\" Corrigan says. \"It's not one of those living rooms everyone looks at but doesn't go into.\"\nCorrigan points to the Salon de Chinois as his favorite room in the ch\u00E2teau. The walls were originally painted by the artist Jean-Baptiste Pillement\u2014one of Marie Antoinette's official painters\u2014and the salon is one of only three surviving rooms painted by him in the world. The murals depict the Western idea of life in 18th-century China.\nEven here Corrigan's main objective was to infuse the space with a sense of ease. \"We used materials, fabrics, and finishes that allow you to live comfortably in the space,\" Corrigan says. \"If you can't, it's not successful.\"\nTo peel back more than a century's worth of paint on the boiserie throughout the house, Corrigan and his team used heat guns. \"Almost all of the ch\u00E2teau was originally painted in what we now consider Trianon gray, a light dove-gray,\" Corrigan says. \"But I wanted it to be light and bright.\"\nCorrigan worked with Paris's Museum Carnavalet in presenting his case to French historical authorities for using brighter hues in the estate's interiors. Eventually the designer was allowed to paint in his desired palette, including this sunny yellow in a small dining room.\nCorrigan approached this hallway with the same energy and enthusiasm as most designers use for a major room\u2014he wanted to make sure it wasn't just a pass-through.\nThe designer furnished the hall with sofas, chairs, desks, and tables. \"It becomes a wonderful almost second living room where people gather before and after dinner,\" Corrigan says.\nPrior to the renovation, the property was equipped with only three bathrooms, all of which were installed before WWII.\nCorrigan sacrificed bedroom space to create luxe en-suite baths. \"On the second floor, I took every other bedroom and turned it into a bathroom,\" he explains. \"So where there had been 20 bedrooms, there are now 10. I ended up with some big bathrooms with fireplaces.\"\nConfronted with 14 guest rooms plus a master bedroom to decorate, Corrigan decided to give every room its own character and style to avoid the ch\u00E2teau feeling like a hotel filled with identical suites.\n\"Each room has its own personality and theme and sense of color,\" says Corrigan. \"This bedroom on the second floor was originally a billiard room. It's another one of my favorite rooms in the ch\u00E2teau.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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