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“Don’t let a house control you – you control how you live in your house.”
That’s the first thing designer Timothy Corrigan tells me during our conversation about the Porcelain Room in his Loire Valley chateau, which is on the cover of our September/October 2024 issue. Although I planned to focus on the details of the image—the exquisite color treatment of the arched opening, the porcelain collection, the 19th-century antique furniture (and we’ll get into all of that), he wanted me to know the backstory, the history, so to speak, of the room itself.
So let’s start here: What is now Corrigan’s china room was the kitchen when he bought it, but it was too small for what he envisioned in the house. “The French can make the most amazing meals in tiny cooking spaces, but as an American, I wanted a kitchen where we could really live and come together,” he says. So Corrigan found another spot in the castle to set up a larger kitchen, then converted that room into a room for his antique china, which he has been collecting for decades.