Gesa Hansen and Charles Compagnon's French Country Kitchen from Coming Home to Nature book

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Designer Gesa Hansen and restaurateur Charles Compagnon met eight years ago in one of his Paris establishments. At the time, she was a single mother living a very urban life with her baby daughter—see A Scandi Furniture Designer’s Apartment on the Place de la République—and he was making a name for himself in the hospitality world (he currently owns three Paris restaurants, including Cafe Compagnon, the subject of 12 Ideas to Steal from a Gesa Hansen-Designed Cafe).

Gesa and Charles now live with their young family of five in an idyllic 19th century stone compound an hour south of Paris in Courances, a village with a moated château and famous garden near the forest of Fontainebleau—aka “the green lung of Paris.” Gesa and two creative friends, all former committed Parisians now living in the same rural vicinity, recently teamed up to produce Coming Home to Nature, a just-published book celebrating “the French art of countryfication.” In our July 4th Required Reading post, we featured Gesa and Charles’s garden party from the book. Today, we’ve moving inside to offer a look at the restaurant-inspired rustic kitchen and its surroundings, designed, of course, by Gesa.

Photography by Stephanie Füssenich and Nathalie Mohadjer, unless noted, courtesy of Flammarion and Gesa Hansen from Coming Home to Nature. Follow the book @countryfication.

morning in the courtyard. gesa is a furniture and interior designer who comes f 17 — Above: Morning in the courtyard. Gesa is a furniture and interior designer who comes from a long line of Scandinavian and German designers. She studied in Japan and at the Bauhaus University in Germany, and in her early years in Paris worked for Jean Nouvel Atelier; she now runs her own studio, Gesa Hansen, from Courances, and works with The Hansen Family, her parents’ furniture company. Photograph by Bellero.

charles, romy, and finn prepare to make their homemade nutty granola (recipe on 18 — Above: Charles, Romy, and Finn prepare to make their homemade nutty granola (recipe on page 152 of *Coming Home to Nature*). The kitchen came with its *grès cérame* stoneware checked floor; all else is new.

&#8\2\20;since charles is used to restaurant kitchens, he always wants open 19 — Above: “Since Charles is used to restaurant kitchens, he always wants open storage, so that he knows where everything is,” says Gesa, noting that the only tools left out in the open are the ones that get used and cleaned frequently: “If you cook as much as we do the grime doesn’t have time to settle.”

The all-stainless range is by Smeg and has an induction cooktop—Charles initially wanted gas, she notes, but induction is much more energy-efficient not to mention better for the environment, and the latest models are now so high-functioning that all of Charles’s restaurants use induction. The backsplash tiles are zellige.