About two south of Paris by car, France’s Sologne region — with its dense forests full of wild boars, pheasants, woodcocks and red deer — has been a favorite sporting ground for wealthy Parisians since at least the mid-19th century. In addition to hunting, the area has long been associated with at times scandalous social life, as depicted in the director Jean Renoir’s 1939 film “The Rules of the Game,” about illicit love affairs among a group of aristocrats on a country weekend. Even today, the landscape is dominated by the vast hunting estates that inspired that satire and, for the past five years, the Paris-based Austrian architect and designer Katja Pargger, 44, has been working on one of them.
The second home of a Parisian businessman in his mid-60s, the roughly 2,500-acre property features a nine-bedroom chateau built in the late 19th-century Solognot style, a relatively modest expression of classical French architecture characterized by brick-and-limestone facades and pitched tiled roofs. When approached via the long driveway that winds through thick swaths of oak, chestnut and ash trees, “the chateau appears suddenly,” says Pargger, “as if it had been lying dormant in the forest, waiting to be rediscovered.”
That sense of having stumbled upon a treasure excited Pargger when she first saw the place in 2019. The three-story chateau and its outbuildings — which included a timber-framed guesthouse, a large hunting pavilion and more than 2,000 square feet of stables — were all in need of total restoration. “Architects rarely have the opportunity to work across such a varied ensemble, with the freedom to give each building a distinct identity,” she says.
Over the next five years, she converted all of the outbuildings into accommodations, bringing the bedroom count to 30, and opened up the existing floor plan of the chateau itself, which was previously a jumble of smaller interconnected rooms. She added a generous elongated entrance hall with a view straight through to the back of the house, as well as a wrought-iron-and-glass conservatory that now serves as a dining and living area overlooking the lawn and ponds. At the hunting pavilion, new window openings were positioned to frame both passing glimpses of green and wide panoramas. “It was about creating very calm, decent and sober architecture,” she says, “where you can feel the space always connected with the outside.”
Though Pargger lived in Paris for nearly two decades, having relocated there for a job with the architectural firm Dietmar Feichtinger, her design sensibility is rooted in her small-town Austrian upbringing. As a child in Ehrwald, a Tyrolean village with typically Alpine timber architecture, she attended the local church every Sunday, and its monastic style remains a strong influence. Her namesake studio, which she established in 2013, has become known for an approach that centers rigor and restraint. “I don’t believe in radical gestures,” says Pargger, who generally avoids pattern and uses color sparingly. Her interiors often feature almost gothic details, such as black leather blankets, antique tapestries and totemic objects like silver chalices or busts set on stone or wooden pedestals.
In Sologne, she conceded to covering the living room walls in a deep red fabric at the owner’s request, but otherwise, all the walls and ceilings are off-white. In the entrance hall, she added pale oak paneling and timber ceiling beams, as well as black-and-white damier stone flooring (directly inspired by “The Rules of the Game”). A branch-shaped chandelier by the French sculptor Joy de Rohan Chabot hangs above.
The two upper floors hold the nine bedrooms, all with deep green wool curtains on the windows and substantially scaled furniture meant to stand up to the 12.5-foot ceilings. Table lamps with parchment shades; low mirror-topped night stands; and black glazed-ceramic half-moon-shaped tables — all designed by Pargger — are softened by gilded frames sourced from Paris’s Saint-Ouen flea market and by ornately carved antique wooden chests. From the owner’s collection, she chose several still-life oil paintings by the 18th-century French artist Alexandre-François Desportes and about 20 Aubusson tapestries — hung on the walls and draped over beds — that echo the deep green gardens and grounds reimagined by Louis Benech, the landscape architect who restored the Jardin des Tuileries and a section of the gardens at the Élysée Palace.
Along the new driveway, Benech, 68, added trees at the edge of sight to draw the eye far into the distance, and laid paths that weave gently through the landscape. Blackthorn hedges burst into pale blossom in spring, European holly hedges add brightness during the winter and Japanese maples turn russet at the start of the autumn hunting season. He also planted a succession of pleached lime trees connecting the chateau to what he calls the property’s “most emblematic building”: a chalet-style guesthouse with a large portico and an ornate woodwork frame.
Pargger, too, says that the building — which she describes as “a charming, twisted place” — is why she “really fell in love with the site.” The previous owner told her that it had most likely once served as a sort of private brothel: the upstairs bedrooms had been marked with numbers and hung with burlesque-style nude drawings. Now it’s a place to entertain friends and family, with an inviting front terrace, an immense entryway and a square banquet room with 14.7-foot ceilings and stone floors. One of the new owner’s trophy mounts — the head of a stag from the estate — adds a medieval air. In the spacious living room, Pargger put in a procession of narrow vertical windows, designed to reveal glimpses of the trunks of the native box trees just outside. At first, she considered constructing a full glass facade, but decided instead to create fleeting sightlines that add a sense of mystery. “We didn’t want to reveal everything all at once,” says Pargger. In architecture, as in life, what’s hidden is part of the allure.