Recently modernised, this château is like stepping onto a Jean Renoir set

Just south of Paris, architect and designer Katja Pargger took on the task of updating a classic ‘château Solognot’. Over five years, the renovation remained elegant and restrained, yet full of surprises

By Anna Solomon

published 7 February 2026

in Features

Antique kilim rugs: Galerie Triff; wooden works: Brunhilde Bordeaux-Groult

(Image credit: Photography: Alice Mesguich. Styling: Aurore Lameyre)

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

For a masterclass in renovating a historic property without stripping it of its identity, look to this transformation of a 19th-century hunting estate in the Sologne region, near the Loire Valley. Architect and designer Katja Pargger was tasked in 2020 with restoring a Napoléon III-era château – a quintessential château Solognot, the traditional rural manor houses native to central France – as well as reimagining several outbuildings, including a separate guest inn. The surrounding landscape was concurrently reworked by Louis Benech, the designer behind Paris’s Jardin des Tuileries.

The central challenge of a renovation of this scale and pedigree lay in preserving the château’s classical French language. To the original lime-rendered façades, hand-made brickwork and terracotta roofs, Pargger added a pair of black wrought-iron conservatories. Positioned symmetrically, they frame the building without disrupting its silhouette, while creating gentle transitions between the house and the surrounding forest and meadows.

Inside, Pargger adopts a Bauhaus-inspired approach, treating architecture, furniture and objects as parts of a single, cohesive system. Spaces are shaped by clean geometric forms and tactile materials such as raw wood, lacquer, stone, lime and leather. Materials are intentionally left unfinished – aged wood, woven textiles, natural stone – reinforcing the understated sophistication associated with rural French manor houses.

Throughout the interiors, historical and contemporary references are layered with confidence: checkerboard floors, Briare enamel tiles, tapestries and artworks drawn from different eras and geographies. This approach not only brings the past into dialogue with the present, but also lends the house a richly lived-in quality, as though it has evolved organically over generations rather than emerged fully formed from a recent renovation.

In the guest inn, Pargger leans into the building’s generous volumes, flooding the interiors with daylight through skylights and horizontal windows. Each room balances crisp architectural lines with warm wood panelling and bespoke soft furnishings, creating spaces that feel both open and intimate. Custom-designed elements – parchment bedside lamps, mirrored nightstands, velvet headboards – are complemented by unexpected gestures, such as a latex kimono displayed on a 19th-century Japanese stand.

The atmosphere recalls Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), set on a Sologne estate. Renoir resists presenting it as an awe-inspiring palace; instead, he films it as a porous domestic space threaded with doors, corridors, staircases and balconies – an architecture that allows people to overhear, pass through and observe one another.

This project demonstrates a sensitivity to history without lapsing into pastiche. With her carefully judged interventions, Pargger has crafted a place where, like in The Rules of the Game, life can unfold organically.

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Anna Solomon is Wallpaper’s digital staff writer, working across all of Wallpaper.com’s core pillars. She has a special interest in interiors and curates the weekly spotlight series, The Inside Story. Before joining the team at the start of 2025, she was senior editor at Luxury London Magazine and Luxurylondon.co.uk, where she covered all things lifestyle and interviewed tastemakers such as Jimmy Choo, Michael Kors, Priya Ahluwalia, Zandra Rhodes, and Ellen von Unwerth.