PORTRAIT MODE

Robert Couturier returns to his roots in a manor house in Normandy.

- Camille Okhio

Robert Couturier's eye for scale, color, and material is just as appropriate for modern living as it would have been in the ancien régime he so favors. The ELLE DECOR A-List Titan's skill is such that a lifetime wouldn't be long enough for most to achieve it. "I think I was born designing," he says. "I had absolutely no inclination to do anything else." Even in geometry class, for which Couturier had a noted aptitude, his mind traveled to aesthetics. "At college, when everyone else was rendering a cube, I chose to render the coronation carriage of King Philip of Spain," he says. And now, after decades living in the United States, he has returned to the country that shaped his vision.

Couturier calls it destiny that the perfect summer place for him a 17th-century manor in Normandy, France, modest by the usual standards with just three bedrooms and a few surrounding acres-was in the same area as a former family home he knew as a child. "I only discovered after buying it that a house of my grandmother's was a few miles away," he says. It was an easy thing to missCouturier's grandmother had inherited the building from her father, but with only one daughter and several other residences between her and her husband, it made little sense to keep it. Couturier was five when he last visited.

The newly acquired abode is the crowning achievement of a decades-long career. Originally owned by a family of Huguenots before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced them to relocate, it is undeniably grand and yet still surprisingly livable.