People - Jean-Marc Vrezil
It is a wondrous thing to visit the home of Jean-Marc. Carefully, lovingly curated with possessions and stories in every room - in every corner of every room. Handmade pieces, sensitive arrangements and memory markers of people and places that they love. It is incredibly beautiful, but also it is a true storyteller of who they are and what home is. Jean-Marc tells us what home means to him - I hope it brings you joy.
“I often speak aloud my thoughts in each room, as if I am talking directly to the house. It has brought us only happiness and I always look at it like a family member that I would like to grow old with. ”
“My childhood was spent in the south of France near the Spanish border, in a small town called Perpignan and the surrounding villages during the 1970s.
My grandparents were social climbers. Their home reflected their advancement in life, from a very modest rural farming and trading community into an emerging middle-class, at the turn of the 20th century.
They had the luxury of building their own house at the village’s edge. A big cube on three floors, comprising of several cellars and a magnificent attic, in which I used to love foraging to the exasperation and despair of my grandmother.
With their new affluence, they furnished it in their own taste. They mixed dark Catalan vernacular furniture inherited from their parents with reproduction English Jacobean furniture – deemed fashionable in France around the time of the Second World War.
My Grandad travelled to Paris with good quality oak timber and went rue Saint Antoine behind the place of La Bastille, centre of furniture making at the time. Here he commissioned a three-piece dining set (table, dresser and sideboard) to his specifications in this particular favoured style of English Tudor revival.
Through them, I understood the meaning of house-pride, compounded by their stories of family reunions under this idiosyncratic and comfortable roof, which became a shelter for all the family children evacuated from the rest of France during the war.
“All these experiences forged my attachment to, and fascination with, objects from the past, which I always depicted as more colourful than the present.”
Their house was crammed with objects, ready to be discovered by a child like myself. Everything they had accumulated in the course of a lifetime painted a picture of people familiar to me, but with the youth vitality they had lost. It always mesmerised me to imagine them as better versions of themselves.
Every day, my grandmother looked after her best friend, Mme Bartres – a widow in her 90s, living in the same village. Her house, in which my grandmother would spend most of her afternoons, was like a film set where I was allowed to roam freely whilst I waited for their visit to end.
In the middle of an enormous neglected garden was this grand Belle Epoque house, dusty, dark and ghostly but full of beautiful ornaments in every room. There was a permanent smell of cat food in the air. And Mme Bartres looked like a mummy dressed in black Catalan lace, waiting for the end to come like a Miss Havisham, lost in the faded grandeur of her past life.
All these experiences forged my attachment to, and fascination with, objects from the past, which I always depicted as more colourful than the present.
Both my parents grew up in the same village. The value of treasuring good quality furniture, passed down from one generation to the next was instilled in them both – like a sense of moral ascendency translated by the way we took care of our home.
Their story is a bowl of mixed emotions. But as their marriage collapsed, home never quite felt like a sanctuary. Unsurprisingly, my home focus today is for it to be a sanctuary for my relationship with my partner. And for it to nurture us by contributing to the physical and emotional comfort we felt was missing in childhood.
As part of the Generation X, we were lucky enough to be able to purchase this current house – a four bedroom Victorian terrace, on five half-floors in the Finsbury Park area, in 2004.
The house was sold on probate on behalf of the deceased, who had lived all his life in it, just like his parents before him. So it hadn’t suffered any restyling at the hands of a succession of overzealous owner/decorators, being more or less as it was the day it was built. It had the most basic electrical system but no plumbing, and was still arranged in the style of a classic Victorian tenanted property, with neither bathrooms nor kitchen.
In contrast, every historical feature was still intact and the feeling of space and of connection with the past was overwhelming as we walked in on our first visit.
The mysterious emotion of belonging to the place was further vindicated by the fact that the sale went ahead without a glitch.
We proceeded to renovate the house over the following 8 months. Without the money for a grand architectural reshuffling, we kept most of the original layout and preserved as many of the period features as possible.
It was exhilarating to find Victorian plaster work and cornicing, shutters and fireplaces in every room, Bakelite light switches and old rolls of wallpaper. I was transported back to my grandparents’ house, experiencing again my childish fascination for the abyssal depth of the past but with a fresh anticipation about the future.
Living on the premises during the renovation is not advisable, but it cements the bond between you and the place.
We realise that such a large space for two people is an extreme luxury in London but, at the same time, we always imagined the house functioning for the enjoyment of all our loving visitors.
“Curating your own space quickly turns into an obsession because it’s an amazing large empty canvas on which you can project anything that makes you happy.”
When it comes to taste my Danish partner and I are from different and, at times, seemingly opposite European cultures, so compromise is a key word. We tried to marry the style between French shabby chic and Nordic cool, throwing-in the appropriate English eclecticism, in keeping with the character of the house. The rooms found their themes quite organically, building from objects that we liked.
eBay was in its infancy and became the most treasured tool to find pretty much everything that came into the house. Curating your own space quickly turns into an obsession because it’s an amazing large empty canvas on which you can project anything that makes you happy.
For that reason it can be difficult to look away from it. I realise that a bigger life happens outside, but the pull of our house is irresistible, like that of a lover reflecting back at you only the beautiful things you want to see.
The future is unpredictable, physically, emotionally and financially. And since so much of ourselves is in our home, the idea of separation can be anxiety-inducing.
I often speak aloud my thoughts in each room, as if I am talking directly to the house. It has brought us only happiness and I always look at it like a family member that I would like to grow old with. Although we are only custodians of things, my heart will always belong to this house.”
Images by Kalina Krawczyk.
