The French bistro chairs on the "breakfast patio" are literally the dream.
What a way to rock the house! On her nine-acre property in Sonoma, California, designer Wendy Owen used local fieldstone to build her own French-inspired village, filled with rustic pavilions for entertaining and picturesque sheds for gardening and cooking.
Designer Wendy Owen made the dining table on her Sonoma property from antique salvaged beams; she slipcovered the Ron Mann Design chairs in vintage burlap grain sacks. A grouping of five chandeliers illuminates the table.
Owen created six stone buildings inspired by ones she saw in Provence. Outside the ivy-clad dining pavilion, an antique stone sink from France was repurposed as a fountain, and a needlepoint chair from a consignment store is covered in live moss.
"This is not a fancy, decked-out kitchen: The counter is a slab of oak, the sink is a French stone bowl and the mossy burl of the tree outside the window is the perfect piece of art," says Owen. She embellished a simple steel-tube chandelier with grapevines, ivy and live moss.
The breakfast patio is set with French café chairs and a stone table. The dishes are by Astier de Villatte.
Owen's master bedroom faces a stone terrace where a small pond encircles a wall covered in creeping fig. For cuttings, she adores her Limelight hydrangeas: "They turn chartreuse in summer, so I painted the ball pillows to match."
Owen used water channels to create a scenic fountain.
An old garden trowel serves as the door knocker on the potting shed. Owen stores vintage terra-cotta pots, watering cans and plant bulbs in the fieldstone building. "It's also a lovely place to have girlfriends over for tea," she adds. The grounds are covered in shrub oaks, century-old olive trees and Provençal lavender. "It's not the easiest to tend," she says of the latter, "but it's the most beautiful and fragrant."
"If we had a pool, this would be the cabana," Owen says of the three-sided lounge pavilion, which was inspired by an outdoor room she saw in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. To complement 100-year-old hand-hewn beams from the Midwest, Owen crafted a huge "jigsaw puzzle–style" wooden table (she plants succulents in the mortise holes). She made the chandeliers out of beehives. The pillows, felted ball cushions and hand-painted throw are by Wendy Owen Design.
Owen is seated on a hemp-covered banquette made of hefty cinder blocks and concrete. "When I go, it will stay," jokes the designer, who sells antiques and her own furniture line in her shop at Sienna Antiques in Petaluma. Read more about her inspiration for this property here.
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This story originally appeared in the May 2017 issue of House Beautiful.
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