Charm, character and sentimentality are the abiding design principles of Colette LaVette. The life project of her home has the preoccupations of her life’s work, her art, mirrored in it. Compelled by Colette’s design, we spoke to her about the process behind creating a home – also the location of her studio – for her young family in the context of her successful career as a painter.
History
In her paintings Colette is inspired primarily by primitivism – as you can see in the elemental figures, primordial dancers, of the ‘Holocene Jazz’ series, and the swirling, mystic materiality of ‘Orange Blossom’. The latter is painted with oil on linen: Colette makes her own cruelty free paints and uses sustainable materials – across paper, cotton, and bamboo – as a canvas. It’s this sympathy that also activates her imagination in the place she and her family have chosen for a home: a cottage most likely dating back to the 15th century, originally an outbuilding to a manor house. This is, she says, perhaps of little surprise given that her paintings are “often explorations of notions relative to our ancestors, and our current state of existence being entirely dependent upon the past.”
Family
What inspires Colette about this historical space is the lives of those who came before. Colette gave birth to her second daughter here, with the awareness that many will have done so before her: “It’s events like this, connecting us through time, that excites, intrigues, and inspires me.” This joy comes through in the design of her children’s rooms, which incorporate sanctuary and fantasy alike: she sees their home most importantly as “a background to my daughters’ childhoods”.
Colette cites the desienger Royère as an influence, famous for a new variety of fabulous minimalism in such designs as the ‘polar bear sofa’ and ‘egg chair’, and who said his aim was to create “harmonious spectacle to enchant the eye, rejoice the heart and elevate the spirit”.
Colette attests to the vitality of the duality of minimalism and maximalism in her work. This comes through in her signature palette, which features natural, gentle tones that are nonetheless strongly harmonious, forcefully complementary. In paintings such as the ‘Holocene Jazz’ series and ‘Etna‘, these forces come together in works that are at once ethereal and organic, earthly.
Growth
On the horizon for Colette is re-thatching the roof, among other necessary tasks for maintaining the integrity of such an old building. For now, the roughness around the edges makes her find it more homely, and there are many characteristic period features – such as nooks in the wall – that her artist’s eye has yet to make the most of. The quote that Colette gives us, “that which you hold, holds you”, is one she is ambivalent about, but she believes objects have the ability to create links between people as well as between different times, and as such are capacious repositories for feeling. Such an object in her house is the re-homed, wonky Ian Freemantle dining table: she hopes it will set the scene for many meetings of family and friends, which her children will look back on as the focal point of their time in the family home – just as she remembers the Italian dining table newly arrived in her parents house when she was six or seven years old.
Colette told us that how “my home is an extension of my art … and when I can’t put paint to canvas, I can always source vintage furniture and curate an ever evolving space as a continuation from those before me.” Hers is an example of symbiosis between the artist’s life and work, pervaded with the same ethos her work purveys: that of the miraculous merging of practical care for materials and the sensuous life of the imagination.
Words by Maggie