The Edition

THE FRENCH INTERIOR designer François Champsaur has become known over the past four decades for imagining the kinds of big, sophisticated residences and hotels — including the interiors of Ian Schrager’s Edition in Madrid and of Public in Los Angeles, opening next month — that enshrine clean, contemporary style using materials like steel and glass. Yet Champsaur, 61, grew up in Marseille the son of a ceramist mother and, since the beginning of his career, he’s been drawn to the countercultural, naturalistic impulses of 20th-century American artists like JB Blunk, who worked largely in wood and clay, and Isamu Noguchi, whose furniture, light fixtures and landscaping schemes were defined by their fluid, organic lines. Six years ago, when Champsaur was invited to present at the Design Parade Toulon, held annually by Villa Noailles, an early Modernist home turned contemporary art center in the south of France, he referenced Noguchi — “my hero,” he says — and Italian radicalism to create Utopie Frugale, a table-as-kitchen sculpted entirely in terra cotta that has four fat, conical legs and a wide surface with dedicated areas for washing one’s hands, chopping vegetables, juicing citrus fruits and serving meals.

The project reflected his changing lifestyle: He’d stopped buying from supermarkets in favor of small organic shops, switched to natural wine and replaced refined sugar with honey. Not long afterward, he reduced the size of his agency from 15 to four employees. Then he moved into his own studio behind the Musée Picasso Paris in the Marais, where he rededicated his life to taking on fewer and smaller commissions, all defined by their lack of plastic and their reliance on materials, such as plaster and straw, harvested from the earth. “In the history of humanity, I think metal and plastic is a phase. We have to stop,” Champsaur says. “The new modernity is one where we find a solution to work with the natural.”

He says this while standing near his terra-cotta kitchen experiment, which he had shipped to a second studio he now maintains in northwestern Majorca, outside the village of Sóller. It’s on a secluded acre or so of tree-knotted, coastal hillside that’s so steep the Balearic Sea looks almost vertical, like a sparkly blue scrim. Champsaur, who’s been visiting the island for nearly two decades, discovered this property in 2012, then spent four years persuading its Majorcan owners to sell, and just as many renovating it. The year he bought it, he went to a friend’s house for dinner in nearby Deià and met his wife, Catherine Baudet, 55, a French lifestyle journalist who now works as a medium, partly because of the energy she felt emanating from the surrounding Tramuntana mountain range — which the couple and other residents refer to as “Drama-tana,” for the moodiness it incites. “The mountain’s made of crystal, so it either chooses you or rejects you,” she says. “Do you feel well here?”

OVER AN ALFRESCO summer lunch of soy-marinated raw local tuna and tomato salad with shiso grown in the garden, it seems impossible not to feel well — especially because Champsaur has made a home that’s “completely intuitive,” as he says, “listening to the birds, seeing what I want.” Across rocky terraces cut into the slope, there are several detached structures, including the small studio erected inside a decades-old limestone kiln at the highest point, with its salvaged wood roof beams and porthole window overlooking the ocean. Beneath that is a frigid open-air well that the couple can drink from and swim in during the four or six months they spend on the island each year, near which Champsaur plans to add a hot stone sauna soon, next to an outdoor kitchen he set up. And then there’s the 968-square-foot, two-story main house, originally formed from concrete about a century ago on a foundation of stone and earth, which is basically the only part that remains.

Instead of tearing down the blocky cabin, Champsaur rebuilt it from the inside out, wooing the island’s craftspeople to collaborate with him. First he reclad the whole thing in limestone, plaster and beeswax, which together cool the interior and make it water- and insect repellent. Only after he removed the humidity-prone concrete walls was the designer able to recruit a local specialist to install natural floors. Champsaur also improved the rooms’ flow, from the kitchen on one side that leads into a combined dining and living room, with the primary bedroom behind it next to a round sculptural staircase up to an attic, where a guest or two can spend the night. Occasionally, the renovations would go wrong: A horseshoe-shaped fireplace had to be remade by a French plasterer after workers couldn’t match the perfectly symmetrical proportions of Champsaur’s terra-cotta maquette. But the designer’s savior was Jaime Bauza, his contractor and stonemason — “his mistress,” as Catherine jokes — with whom Champsaur built walls, paved several outdoor eating and lounging patios that unite the disparate elements and continues to envision new plans. “He tells me I’m crazy, but I like that,” the designer says. “Year by year, we make things. You have to stay flexible, which is the opposite of how you learn in design school.

The overall effect is of a crumbling villa crouched within the dusty terrain, even if most of its construction — if not the craft and techniques enabling it — is recent. Champsaur has furnished the place sparely, mostly with his own designs, which include chestnut-wood dining chairs and a deep daybed, its mattress stuffed with sheep’s wool shorn nearby. He’s placed Joan Miró-like antiques and earthenware from the area’s artisans on soft white plaster shelves set into most walls. The couple have also begun hosting artistic workshops on-site, inviting woodworkers as well as natural dyers who use kakishibu (a Japanese pigment made from persimmon tannins) to make clothes and throw pillows with them and their friends. “Humans are in a position where we have to work with nature,” Champsaur says, as he hides from the afternoon sun under a thatched pergola on a stone bench with a cushion covered in umber-colored fabric. “If not, we burn. But I don’t want to be political. I don’t want to fight. I just want to make something good. Because we need to have a vision for the future that’s simple, cool and inspiring.” A world, in other words, that still allows us to dream.