American building, decorating, and gardening à la française is nothing new—but to have a French couple embrace Yankee style is, well, incroyable. “My husband studied at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and we got married in the Hamptons, so I said, ‘Let’s do an American house,’ ” says Françoise Labro, a shelter-magazine editor turned luxury-brand consultant who lives in the Paris area. So, nearly 30 years ago, up went a charming shingled cottage on the forested acreage that she and Philippe, a legendary author and film director, own in Normandy. Then, with the assistance of a young garden designer named Louis Benech—now an AD100 Hall of Famer—the house soon became embowered by an evocation of an East Coast woodland.
Flowering dogwoods, Virginia’s state tree, spangle the Labros’ 2.5-acre weekend escape, joined by compatriots of all varieties, from mock oranges to catalpas to Aralia spinosa, a.k.a. devil’s walking stick, a tall, theatrical, tropical-looking shrub “you see on New York roadsides,” Benech explains. “For me, the garden is like walking into a dream, and my dreams are memories from other countries,” the globe-trotting Françoise says, adding, “I am more attached to the garden than to the house.”
Years later, her love of Japan (“I try to go once a year”) led Benech to come back when an adjoining sliver of land fell into his clients’ hands. That area, connected to the American side with a yew allée, is not Japanese in appearance, though. The woodland concept continues, but many of the plants are Japanese, such as irises like those Françoise saw in Kyoto. There’s a bit of England in the mix, too, namely a Kiftsgate rose, a long-ago souvenir from the Cotswolds that has scrambled into the treetops and which the Labros hurry from Paris to see in June during its 15 days of white-cloud perfection. Says Françoise, “It’s my idea of paradise.”
