For many years, all of our friends referred to it as Maison l’Erreur,’ the artist Annie Morris explains. ‘We were going to make a sign.’ Her husband and fellow artist Idris Khan continues: ‘It was a running joke: “Do you want to come to Maison l’Erreur this summer? OK, maybe next summer. Definitely next summer.”’
It may have taken eight summers of anticipation – hosting intrepid guests in ‘a total building site’; picnicking at the bottom of the empty pool; heaving heavy furniture into the still-derelict barn to imagine what it was going to look like – but the pair’s perseverance paid off. Their restored farmhouse and former wine barn in rural Dordogne is exactly the kind of place you would want to come and spend a summer in: bright, open, convivial and filled, at every turn, with interesting and beautiful things. The converted barn, its walls stained chalky-black by years of wine fermentation, is now home to a noteworthy collection of contemporary art, but it also regularly doubles as a dance floor, where Annie, Idris, their two children and guests throw parties in the multicoloured glow of a giant former circus light. ‘The dream was this big sprawly house where we could have all of our friends and their kids,’ says Annie. ‘And now it is that.’
The couple knew the Dordogne from visiting Annie’s godmother. They celebrated their wedding at her home in 2009, and it was through her that they first found the farmhouse some years later: she was renting it, having sold her own place in preparation to move back to the UK. The owner was Patricia Atkinson, an Englishwoman who, at the end of the 1980s, traded her City of London job for the life of an aspiring viticulturist; Clos d’Yvigne wines, made from vines surrounding the property, have gone on to win numerous awards. By the happy serendipity on which all great projects rely, Atkinson wanted to sell; Annie and Idris were ready to buy.
They worked with the architect Rosaleen Quinn to connect the barn to the farmhouse, creating a large, open-plan kitchen and adjoining living room with a sense of airiness belied by the building’s rustic exterior. Unlike their Georgian town house in London, the size of these spaces has allowed the couple to install large-scale artworks, including many of their own. In the former barn, one of Annie’s earliest stacked sculptures – a tower of colourful, moon-surface spheres with a papier-mâché sense of weightlessness – casts a shadow, like a string of beads, against the blackened stone behind; nearby, one of Idris’s music works, in which a photograph of every page of Mozart’s Requiem is overlaid to create a near-abstract haze of visual static, leans against the floor. The focal point of the room, though, is an enormous painting by their former studio-mate Chantal Joffe, Mother and Child II (2005). In it, the artist, naked, bends to support her young daughter, her body curved over in a protective arc. ‘When this painting arrived, it totally changed the space,’ Annie explains. ‘It looks as though, if she stood up, she’d be the height of the room.’
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The other major structural change was the garden, which was, in Annie’s words, ‘basically a big field’ when they arrived. Under the guidance of designer Luciano Giubbilei, it’s been transformed into a Modernist grid, hard edges softened by the movement of tall grasses and dappled shadows of trees. (‘I wanted it to look like an Agnes Martin from above,’ says Idris.) They met Giubbilei – who has worked on gardens including Great Dixter – at the opening of an exhibition in Mallorca. Originally, the couple had drawn up plans in consultation with a local gardener. ‘When I sent them to [Luciano], he almost fell off his chair. He said: “Oh, Annie, no! Please don’t do that.” He flew immediately to France and we did the project together.’
You look out over the garden from the kitchen’s Crittall windows, a nod to those in Alexander Calder’s studio in the Loire Valley. The house is rich in subtle allusions to art history. In the bedrooms upstairs, patterned fabrics and painted surfaces galore conjure up the Omega Workshops interiors of Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Sussex home, while Annie’s black-and-white markerpen drawings, which dance across the bedroom doors, make me think of Jean Cocteau’s ‘tattooed’ rooms at Villa Santo Sospir. One of the beds is crowned with a headboard of Annie’s design, inspired by an example from Calder for Peggy Guggenheim. Like a line drawing in steel against the white wall behind, it is a striking feature in the house’s most minimal chamber.
Knowing when less is more and when more is more is the great skill of interior design. The couple were aided in this by Gavin Houghton, who, among other things, is responsible for painting the upstairs floorboards glossy black, creating an unexpected foil to the bright furnishings and densely patterned wallpapers. But the house’s look and feel owe much to their dedication to local (and not-so-local) flea markets. Idris explains: ‘Annie is famous for it; I sort of go along. We drive for hours.’ Annie adds: ‘The kids are like, “No! Not an other market!” We get carried away and they have to squish in the back of the rental car with chintz chairs and piles of fabric.’
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The children may complain, but the markets have yielded some spectacular bounty. In addition to the aforementioned circus light (which has 330 bulbs and blows the electrics every time it’s switched on), the kitchen counter is illuminated by a pair of lamps that were once in a Paris park. And it’s not just French markets. They acquired a pair of chests in Marrakesh by following a man carrying them into the labyrinth of the medina. (Retracing their steps to pay him the following day proved challenging.) The bedrooms are filled with beaded chairs they bought while visiting Kenya with friends.
But there is one fleamarket tale that best summarises the house and their approach to it, in all of its charm. Once, while out market trawling with Annie’s mother, they found a green plate. It was slightly more expensive than their usual purchases (‘a couple of hundred quid’), but they were smitten. A while later, friends came to stay with their teenage sons. The plate was broken. After they left, Idris rushed to repair it, pulling shards from the rubbish and reassembling them late into the night with melted wax. On a later return to the mar ket, they recognised the man who had sold them the plate. ‘He had a Salvador Dalíesque moustache and he was smoking a pipe. (So cool,’ Annie remembers.) When they told them how much they loved it, he exclaimed: ‘You mean the [Georges] Braque?! I cannot believe I sold you that! I’ll buy it back.’
The broken Braque remains, perfectly imperfect – a symbol of serendipity, hospitality and sheer joy in the beauty of old things, its crenulated edge like a crown.
A version of this article appeared in the June 2021 Issue of The World of Interiors, and we are revisiting it now upon the opening of ‘Two Worlds Entwined: Annie Morris and Idris Khan’ – which explores the artistic practices of Annie Morris and Idris Khan at Newlands House gallery; offering the opportunity to view the artist couple’s work side by side for the first time in the U.K, until 7 May 2023. Learn about our subscription offers
