Heads up, Hollywood: We’d love to see this story turned into a movie. The main characters: Marjorie Taylor, a pastry chef and cook from Arizona who doesn’t take no for an answer, and her Francophile daughter Kendall Smith Franchini, who leaves the states for university in France and never looks back. The plot: Kendall finds love with a Frenchman, convinces her mom to join her in Burgundy, and the two open up a French cooking school, The Cook’s Atelier, that becomes a sensation among those who fantasize about wooden spoons, Lacanche ranges, and la cuisine du marché (or fresh market cooking).
While we wait for the film version of their lives, we’re happy to pore over the mother-daughter duo’s latest cookbook, French at Heart. As expected, it is chockfull of dog-ear-worthy recipes (100+) and beautiful food photography, but this time, we also get a glimpse of the Woodland House, the dreamy country estate where Kendall, her husband, Laurent, and their three kids live, about thirty minutes south of Beaune.
“[We] call it ‘the inside outside house,’ because between the kids, the dog, three cats, the chickens, and our guests, the doors seem to never close, and our yard simply becomes an extension of the house,” they write. “Everything about it is beautiful, but almost nothing about it is perfect. It allows us to live with one foot outdoors, in a place where we can enjoy picking wild asparagus from the forest and washing our potatoes in the stream and leaning on good neighbors to teach us the rhythm and skill of beekeeping. The Woodland House lives the way we live—seasonally and exuberantly, and sometimes with a bit of a mess.”
Below, we tour their thriving kitchen garden at the Woodland House. Be sure to check Remodelista on Friday for a tour of the interior.
Photography by Anson Smart from French at Heart: Recipes that Bring France Home by Marjorie Taylor and Kendall Smith Franchini with Jess Thomson. Published by Abrams.
Above: Mother and daughter in front of The Cook’s Atelier in Beaune. The space is part boutique, part wine shop, and part classroom.
Above: The Woodland House is located in a tiny hamlet about 30 minutes from The Cook’s Atelier. The family’s gardening journey started with container gardening on their terrace but has since expanded into a lush kitchen garden that provides multiple harvests throughout the growing season. “We grow everything from potatoes and greens to herbs and edible blossoms, starting much of our plants from seed ourselves.”
Above: “Sundays, we dig and weed and harvest together, reveling in the beauty and purity of the ingredients we’ve grown as a family. It’s the best playground we could imagine for our kids.”
Above: Kendall getting a helping hand from her son, Luc. “Each kid has a special section: Luc’s Three Sisters bed, where he plants the traditional Native American trio of corn, beans, and squash, is his domain. Manon’s square is entirely devoted to cornichons, which we pickle with her help. (She can’t get enough of them.) Lou’s strawberry patch gives our youngest an age-appropriate gardening goal; she mostly picks and eats.”
Above: The property also has a greenhouse and chicken coop. “In winter, we let the chickens roam and scratch and
amend the soil before we give it its yearly rest.”
Above: Luc is in charge of moving food and yard waste to the compost pile. “While it might not be practical to change your lifestyle all at once, every little act of reducing waste helps,” Kendall and Marjorie write in the book. Their own waste-minimizing efforts include careful meal planning, pickling and preserving, and composting.
Above: “We always emphasize two things: cooking seasonally and finding high-quality ingredients”—both of which the garden helps them achieve.
Above: “For about half the year, we eat outside on the barn’s terrace, with the warmth of a fire pit on cool evenings. But whether we’re indoors or out, one thing remains the same: For every meal (even breakfast), we set the table, like we did in Phoenix when it was just the two of us,” they write.
Above: In addition to providing recipes and peeks into their home life, the book makes the case for making beauty a part of daily rituals: “We’ve also internalized the French mindset of incorporating natural elements into our meals. At the table inside, this usually means flowers and light. Setting a table with a beautiful bouquet from the market or clippings from our garden feels like an expression of care for the others at the table.”
Above: French at Heart is in bookstores now; $37.20.
For more on The Cook’s Atelier, see:
- A Year in Burgundy: The Cook’s Atelier in Beaune
- Christmas in Burgundy: At Home with the Expat Family Behind the Cook’s Atelier
For more on kitchen gardens, see:
