Home Tour: Atelier Vime

It’s late afternoon and Benoît Rauzy and Anthony Watson’s dog, Alma, is sleeping peacefully in a corner of their Provençal home, her ears occasionally twitching in response to the birdsong in the garden. Sunlight is flooding through a set of French windows, casting a warm glow over the arabesque-patterned floor tiles and the room’s yellow lime-washed walls. An 18th-century Aubusson tapestry glows golden as if illuminated from within. The scene has a painterly quality: It’s not for nothing that the South of France—a land of sun-baked colors and fierce light—has fired the imagination of generations of artists. 

We’re in the “summer salon,” so named for its sunny exposition and color palette. There’s also a snow-white-walled “winter salon” on the other side of the house, but it’s in this cheerful room that the three spend a lot of their time, no matter the season. “In the summer, we have the shutters closed to keep the room cool; in the winter, there’s a fire to warm it up,” says Rauzy, taking a sip from his coffee before placing it on a low rattan table in front of him. “We live in all the spaces of the house all year round.”

Anyone familiar with Rauzy and Watson’s design firm, Atelier Vime, will have seen pictures of the couple’s gray-shuttered hôtel particulier and its dozen or so rooms on the studio’s social media feed. For in addition to being a comfortable family home, the house is also the backdrop against which Rauzy and Waston photograph the pieces from Atelier Vime’s collection of wicker, cord and rattan furnishings, with each shot resembling a tableau of bucolic Provençal living.

When the couple bought their then-crumbling mansion in Vallabrègues, a sleepy village sandwiched between Avignon and Arles, in 2014, they didn’t know it would become the heart of a new business. Rauzy and Watson—an environmental consultant and stylist, respectively—had originally sought a retreat from their busy lives in Paris, but upon renovating the property, they uncovered a piece of local history that they resolved to save from oblivion.

Scattered around the house were hundreds of woven baskets, revealing the property’s past life as a 19th-century wicker workshop in what was once a thriving basketry town. As they settled in, Rauzy and Watson decided to establish a studio for handwoven home accessories and antiques in the same space. “Atelier Vime is born of this very house and village. It wouldn’t exist had we not moved here,” says Rauzy. “Our home is our aesthetic universe,” adds Watson, as he points at the ceramic pots and oil paintings sitting atop a limestone fireplace. “If a piece works well in this setting, we know that it’s worthy of the Atelier Vime stamp.”

Books stacked next to an old fireplace. The couple use the home year-round, alternating between their properties in Paris, Provence and Brittany.

“I like the idea of things evolving and time passing.”

The three floors of their home showcase the couple’s typical aesthetic mélange of Louis XV chairs, Directoire candleholders and embroidered Pierre Frey fabrics, interspersed with rare rattan designs from the Atelier Vime catalog by Charlotte Perriand, Gio Ponti and Robert Mallet-Stevens. With the recent launch of Maison Vime, a seasonal boutique and showroom located on the other side of their garden, within sight of the Rhône River, Rauzy and Watson have appointed some of their own furniture and artwork to give the new space a similar look and feel as their home. It’s the company’s first and only physical outpost, and a way of sharing the founders’ art de vivre with visitors without having to give up their privacy. 

Rauzy and Watson now consider Vallabrègues their main residence, though they keep properties in Paris and rural Brittany. “This is our house of the farniente and the sweetness of life; a place where we eat, nap and read by the pool,” says Rauzy. “Since it was intended to be our holiday house, it was never really designed for working, but we find it easy to get creative here.”

The couple likes to work from a stone-topped table in their large, wood-beamed kitchen. Though the vocation appears to have found Rauzy and Watson upon moving to the countryside, Atelier Vime still resonates with their careers in sustainability and styling in the city. The latter is visible in the brand’s meticulous art direction, while Rauzy’s expertise in water systems has encouraged them to start cultivating their own wicker at their Breton farm, using a traditional method that requires no extra water, other than the dew that collects on the plant.

“We work together in a very democratic way,” explains Rauzy. “There are no rules, really. We’re both involved in every aspect of the business.” Their collaborations with renowned designers, such as Pierre Yovanovitch and David Netto, have inspired the couple to start their own interior design side gig, where they create rustic-elegant spaces for a small clientele.    

The house—and by extension the brand—is also a showcase for a life’s collection of antiques. Rauzy grew up amid the antiquaires of Paris’ rue des Saints-Pères, where the couple have an apartment, and he developed a penchant for colorful Suzani textiles while working in Russia and Uzbekistan. “A lot of the objects we have were handed down from our families,” says Watson, who is a dual British-French citizen and spent his childhood between Cameroon, the UK and his mother’s native Provence.

Out of the two, it’s Rauzy who finds it easier to let go of pieces. “Maybe it’s because I’m older, but I’m more detached than Anthony; I like the idea of things evolving and time passing,” he says. “There are of course items I wouldn’t sell, but that’s more because they are linked to a person or a personal story.” What then would they save if their house was engulfed in flames? “Our dog, Alma,” they both say without hesitation. 

The real pride for them, however, lies beyond their collection and their dog. Rauzy and Watson get a lot of satisfaction from seeing the craft revival that they have triggered in the region. The profession of the wicker worker was virtually extinct by the 1960s, leaving only a handful of specialists. Now, a number of ateliers in and around the village—as well as across France— are reopening their doors to manufacture place mats, lampshades and other wicker items for Atelier Vime.

“Vallabrègues has been getting more attention in the past few years than in the 50 before that; we now have people from all over the world coming to our village to learn about this almost-forgotten savoir-faire,” says Rauzy. “It’s bringing a lot of satisfaction to the local community of artisans to be selling their items elsewhere than at the regional markets.” 

Rauzy and Watson know most of the craftsmen personally and regularly visit them at their ateliers to supervise production.
“We want to make sure we respect the heritage of rural Provence and steer away from the folkloric,” Rauzy adds. He’s referring to Atelier Vime, but he could just as well be talking about the home he and Watson have lovingly created for themselves.