“When I tell people where I live, they say, ‘You are one of the happy few,’” says the German-Danish France-based designer and interior architect Gesa Hansen, as we drive along the small riverside road that leads to her home town of Samois-sur-Seine. For more than a century, this tiny commune, an impossibly postcard-pretty village surrounded by the Fontainebleau forest, has been an escape for wealthy Parisians who summer in their belle époque, half-timbered villas — known as Les Affolantes — set on the banks of the River Seine.
Now, many creative types, like Hansen’s close-knit community of forty-something former Parisians, have made it their permanent home — it is only a 40-minute train ride away from the Gare de Lyon in eastern Paris.
Hansen moved here in 2024, but had been living in the region, in the neighbouring town of Courances, since 2017 with her former husband, the French restaurateur Charles Compagnon. She had often visited her current neighbours and close friends, the interior designer Céline Poulfort and her husband Zach Miskin, who had bought one of Samois-sur-Seine’s emblematic villas in 2020. Behind their home was a two-storey cottage Hansen had often admired, with its own walled garden.
The ‘technical, masculine’ Jean Nouvel for Reform stainless steel kitchen, with contrasting deep olive green paint and the original tomette terracotta floors 
Hansen loves the enormous 3-metre-high, Bauhaus-inspired paned window in her bedroom
“Whenever I passed by, I was struck by its large atelier windows, reminiscent of the Bauhaus,” says Hansen. She had studied at the Bauhaus school before working for the architect Jean Nouvel and eventually starting her own practice, growing it alongside the handcrafted furniture line, The Hansen Family, that she runs with her brother and parents. “One day, I gathered the courage to knock on the door. At the time, the former owner, a painter in her seventies, wasn’t ready to sell, but I told her, “If you ever decide to part with this house, I would love to buy it.” Eventually, that day came.
Hansen arrived with her three children and her Nova Scotia retriever in winter last year, newly divorced and eager for a fresh start. In just three months, she transformed the 1910 house, maximising the modest 100-square-metre floor plan by adapting it from two bedrooms and one bathroom to four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house faces north, so in the downstairs living room she kept the palette light, painting the walls and ceiling in Farrow & Ball’s Slipper Satin, a pale grey chalk, and adding touches of colour — a mustard velvet sofa and curtains and a cosy banquette upholstered in a Pierre Frey botanical print fabric. A La Castellamonte wood-burning stove in the corner is used five months of the year.
The house faces north, so Hansen was careful to use a light palette for the walls 
The pitched roof lends itself to interesting layout quirks, such as an abundance of built-in cupboards and shelves
Through a large arch-shaped opening sits the kitchen, a striking room she painted in deep olive green that offsets the earthy tones of the original tomette terracotta floors. She fitted the space with a Jean Nouvel for Reform stainless steel kitchen, marble benchtops and a Villeroy & Boch sink with a brass tap. “I’ve always loved mixing metals,” she says, adding: “I wanted a very technical, masculine kitchen because I think after the break-up, I was afraid to create a female cliché home.”
We head outside to the garden, a small, square-shaped haven with a patch of lawn and a gravel pathway bordered by beds of gaura, salvia and grasses such as Stipa tenuissima and Pennisetum alopecuroides, as well as juneberry and smoke bush that add colour and texture in autumn. Evergreen topiaries keep the garden lively in winter.
A bathroom’s wood-panelled walls and floorboards have been repainted white in a nod to Hansen’s Scandinavian roots 
Hansen’s two girls share a room to which a mezzanine has been added, painted a soft, calming powdery pink
“Gesa’s brief was clear: she wanted it to feel wuschelig — which means wild, soft and a little bit tousled,” says her landscape gardener Estelle Marandon, another close friend from the region. “With a small house, the garden becomes even more essential — it’s almost like an extra room. We wanted it to feel like a little cocoon, a place where she could wrap herself up and simply feel good.”
This is Hansen’s favourite spot for her morning coffee; it also provides the best view of the home’s charming architecture: the stonework of its facade, the pitched, gabled roof, and the enormous 3-metre-high paned window in Hansen’s bedroom upstairs.
A nook for a bed in her son’s room 
In Hansen’s room, a niche for her desk
The roof on the second floor reaches 4 metres in some parts, which allowed Hansen to add a mezzanine in one of the rooms so her girls could share the space. She painted the room a soft, calming powdery pink: “I will have two girls in puberty, so I thought that was a good choice,” she laughs.
The pitched roof lends itself to interesting layout quirks: plenty of built-in cupboards and shelves, a nook for a bed in her son’s room, and a niche for her desk in her own spacious room. The clever use of space, combined with an abundance of wood-panelled walls and floorboards — all original but repainted white in a nod to her Scandinavian roots — gives the home a nautical feel. A reminder of the nearby river.
‘With a small house, the garden becomes even more essential — it’s almost like an extra room. We wanted it to feel like a little cocoon,’ says landscape gardener Estelle Marandon
Summers in Samois-sur-Seine are spent kayaking and swimming. “It’s not like swimming in the Seine in Paris,” Hansen says with a grin about the hotly debated topic. A keen sportswoman, she is currently training for her skippers’ licence, and she also plays polo at the local club, and rock climbs most weekends in the forest. “Sometimes it’s like being on holiday here,” she says, pulling a banana bread out of the oven and walking next door to Poulfort and Miskin’s home, where she and her children spend much of their time.
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As the four of us enjoy the cake — fragrant and so hot it crumbles — in the late afternoon sun, Miskin wonders if it’s too soon for a glass of wine. Garden aperitifs between neighbours, bouncing from one house to the other, are a regular feature, and their stressed-out Parisian friends often stop by on weekends. “We had friends who stayed for a weekend — by Sunday evening, they had made an offer on the place two houses down,” says Miskin.
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