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Imagine a young woman, her hair blowing in the wind. From a pontoon overlooking a river, she throws breadcrumbs to a family of swans. Behind her, we see a lovely white country cottage. The image looks like something out of an impressionist painting, yet this scene actually took place in front of our eyes, at Chalet Olivet: an unusual little house located just a few minutes from the city of Orléans. The young woman on the pontoon is Alice Moireau, who co-owns the property with her brother. Every house has a story, but this one is particularly incredible: the chalet was built in 1862 to be presented, twenty-five years later, at the Paris Universal Exhibition.
The pride of the Swiss delegation, it was intended to illustrate the country’s decoration and wooden construction expertise. The chalet then met a strange fate: it was dismantled and reassembled over 100 kilometers from Paris, in the Loiret region, perfectly blending into its new surroundings – a bucolic garden invaded by palm trees, mint and lemon verbena.
By the early 20th century, “the place had become quite popular with artists and intellectuals,” Alice explains. And it continued to spell its cast on creative types: a few decades later, Alice’s mother – a painter by profession – bought the two-story house to use as her studio. And while her mother has since passed, Alice’s love for the chalet endures. The next chapter? Turning it into a living space, to be rented out part of the year to vacationers.
The interior design establishes a playful dialogue between “the indoors and outdoors, and to evoke the garden’s colors,” Alice explains between sips of verbena tea. White dominates the rest of the composition, interrupted only by small, cherished objects Alice has found over the years. From the soap dish to the bamboo chaise longue in the upstairs bedroom, the young entrepreneur has thoughtfully considered every detail, ingeniously working around the home’s constraints.
While, so far, Alice has only spent a few weekends a year at the house, she plans one day to live there permanently – perhaps with a little one. For her, this house preserves the memory of time: “I’ll do everything in my power to earn enough to keep it,” she resolves.
