Room of the Month

At Sheffield we teach our students a simple Three-Step Method for designing every room they create:

1. A successful room is functional.
2. A successful room expresses a mood.
3. A successful room exhibits a sense of harmony.

This simple Three-Step Method is the secret of every interior ever designed. We teach our interior design students to consider these three steps every time they look at a room. You'll find the great home decorating ideas in our Room of the Month series as well as in the design tips on this site helpful in creating outstanding room designs.

When our students mail in their interior design project for analysis by their instructor, the instructor starts by commenting on these three Guidelines. Of course, the instructor analyzes other elements of the project too – decor, layout, furniture, style etc. But the key to good decor – and the essential element of every great interior design – is adherence to these three Sheffield Guidelines.

How do they work? How can you apply them? It's beyond the scope of this Web site to teach you every nuance, but you will get an inkling from the Room of the Month Analysis that follows.

Restaurant L’Atelier: Where Interior Design Meets Culinary Design

One of the delights of summertime is the food we associate with a beach town: fresh fish from the sea, mussels, clams, and a whole lot of grease and salt. In cobbled streets of the beach towns on the Brittany coast of France, one succumbs quickly to the siren call of moules frites---french fries with mussels, usually preparing “a la mariniere, in a lemon and garlic sauce, served with plenty of bread for sopping up every last delicious bit.

The region of Brittany and Normandy doesn’t just boast great seafood; the landscape surrounding the sea is acres of flat, rich farmland, dotted with quaint villages in which it’s easy to imagine the great French painters of the 18th century finding their subjects. From the farmers come the traditional galette, similar to a crepe but made with heavier wheat flour. These are cooked on a flat, hot pan, with an egg cracked into the center. Once you add the fresh, rich cheese of the region, you have an irresistible meal.

But as delectable as moules frites and galette are, they can’t sustain a hard-working tourist forever. And after several days of the same fare, you start casting your net for something different. Something cooked with a precise attention to flavor and presentation. Something with delicacy and richness.

Something like what you find at Restaurant L’Atelier, on Rue de la Herse in St. Malo.

St. Malo, once a small fishing village, has a rich history. It was originally an island, and in the Middle Ages was made into a fortified city, complete with a tall stone wall protecting it from invaders. One can walk the ramparts and watch the sea make its dramatic shift from high tide to low. The change is so great that there are two islands off the coast that are accessible only at low tides.

Today, the town is home to internationally-recognized stores, such as L’Occitane, as well as local or French shops, such as Blanc sur Nil, which specializes in clothing made from white Egyptian cotton.

And it’s here that this summer, Chef Christophe Dabout decided to open a restaurant---and he had just three weeks to put it all together.

Through a translator, Dabout said that he knew exactly the look he wanted for the restaurant: the name, L’Atelier, means “workshop,” and he wanted the feeling to be of coming into a place where food is created the way that art is created---“le fabrication por cuisine,” Dabout said.

“I wanted a feeling of a workshop, where things are created from scratch.”

And he knew exactly which designers he wanted to work with: Sabine Ducarn and Laetitia Fauchoix.

“When I said what kind of interior I wanted, they understood immediately and the place asked for it,” Dabout said.

In keeping with the concept of an atelier, during the off-season Dabout will offer classes to every level of culinary student, including classes on combining wine and food.

But for now, he has opened a restaurant after just three weeks of preparation. And yet the end result looks as if it took months.

Laetitia Fauchoix and Sabine Ducarn are indeed a team: “It’s our own cuisine together, “Ducarn said. Fauchoix is the expert on materials, and Sabine handles much of the technique, but the two women also blend their skills.

Sabine said that her background as an artist helps in her work now as a designer. “It comes through painting,” she said. There are techniques in painting that you can use in interiors.”

Those techniques include the trompe l’oeil exhibited in the restroom of L’Atelier: you could easily think they forgot to hide the water pipes on the walls and ceiling, until you realize that indeed, your eye has been tricked.

“We looked at a lot of books on factories. Christophe wanted a particular look for the bath and the pipe gives an industrial look,” Ducarn said.

“And they never leak,” Dabout added.

Because the building is “classé”---protected by historic preservation laws---they had to maintain certain aspects of the original building. But that wasn’t a problem, as all three agreed that the original structure worked perfectly for the restaurant’s concept. The vaulted windows over the doors enhance the “atelier” look, and the cobbled street outside offers a taste of the palette within.

“When we look for ideas we like to think first of the materials and then the color palette,” Ducarn said.

For the look of the exterior, they worked on finding a technique and finding a material that would give the look of an ancient, fading patina. They achieved this with a concoction of glue, pigment, and varnish- --something neither woman had done before.

This look of the exterior, and the palette, continue into the restaurant itself. Inside, the look is clean and sparse, the way a workshop of any sort is after the day’s work is done. We were fortunate enough to dine there the first night L’Atelier opened, and the fresh scent of wood from the butcher block tables was still in the air.

The colors of the interior---brick red, grey-black, blue- grey continue the theme of the workshop. “When we look for ideas we like to think first of the materials, and then the color palette,” Ducarn said.

The grey walls are wood, but are painted to look like concrete, and in a tour de force of trompe l’oil, what appear to be steel girders in the ceiling are really wooden beams. The ceiling is painting to look like the “voliage” roof coverings found in France.

One of the walls was created to look as if the plaster had been scraped off to reveal the brick below---in reality both were installed by Ducarn and Fauchoix.

It took them just five days to create the entire wall.

For her design work, Ducarn calls on what she learned at the renowned Van Der Kelen school in Brussels, where she studied painting and design. She also works as an oil painter, specializing in painting realistic portraits of shoes.

For Chef Dabout’s part, he’s happy that his restaurant now looks the way he had envisioned it, and he’s happy to be preparing the meals he loves to make, from fresh fish and vegetables from the local farm market. The food is delicate, perfectly seasoned, and a refreshing break from the moules frites and galettes.

L’Atelier opened during the first week of the booming tourist season in St. Malo, and already tourists and locals were crowding in for lunch and dinner. And it’s no surprise. From the fois gras to the salmon drizzled with a Genvoise sauce, from the delicately sliced melon with sorbet to the pot of warmed chocolate sauce, the food is at a level one would expect to find in the best restaurants in Paris, but at half the price.

And that’s good news for the hundreds of tourists descending on St. Malo this summer.

— Sarah Van Arsdale

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