I Followed Julia Child’s Breadcrumbs to Bring Her Provençal Kitchen Into the Future
Photo: Peter Jackson
Makenna Held fell in love with La Pitchoune, the Provence, France, dwelling of late celebrity chef Julia Child, after reading about its return to market in a 2015 New York Times article. Sight unseen, she purchased the icon’s former estate and moved to Châteauneuf de Grasse to open The Courageous Cooking School, where home cooks can learn the fundamentals of developing dishes from scratch without using recipes. Below, Held explains what it’s like to live in a home stuffed with culinary memories and shares how she and her team are carrying Child’s legacy forward, as told to Juliet Izon.
I found out the house was on the market because I went to Julia Child’s alma mater, Smith College, and was part of a forum on Facebook for alumni. There was a post about the listing and that was really interesting for someone like me, who went to Smith, loved food, and loved France. So I called the real estate agent, but the house had already sold. When I found out, I was really bummed; I’d already thought through a lot of the process of potentially launching a business there and sent emails to investors asking, “Hey, do you wanna buy Julia Child’s house? How cool would that be?”
But then, surprisingly, it went back on the market. I got on the phone with investors and we talked to the real estate agent, mortgage brokers, and lawyers, about all the things we had to do to make the purchase happen. One of the investors flew out the next Tuesday, saw the place on Wednesday, we put an offer in on Thursday, and it was approved on Friday. And that was that. I had never seen the house.
La Peetch
Julia’s original kitchen was olive green and baby blue. When we arrived, it had been reimagined with a pale yellow and almond pink by Kathie Alex, a chef who had moved in after Julia’s residency. Kathie had painted Julia’s pegboard yellow and then painstakingly redrew the original outlines. When we repainted, we left the pegboard pale yellow, but brightened the rest of the room to whites and off-whites. We also had to redo the roof, so we used that opportunity to put skylights in the kitchen. We followed Julia’s breadcrumbs. Well, I always like to say that it’s really not breadcrumbs—sometimes, a baguette suddenly drops out of the sky and says, “This is your opportunity to put in more light in the kitchen without putting in a new light fixture!” The first time I walked into the redone kitchen, I wept uncontrollably, because it was so bright and so different.
But Julia’s pegboard remains intact. I don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep it as is, honestly, because pegboard is porous and it’s been in a working kitchen since the 1960s. Something we talk about all the time is that it’s not sustainable to keep everything as is forever. And that’s so hard. That’s the balance we’re constantly running: How do we honor what was and change it into what will be, given what we need to do?
Portrait Of Julia Child In Her Kitchen
The kitchen has this catalyzing effect on people. Our ability to perpetuate that authentic feeling of her spirit here has changed over time. It’s not a museum. I like to say it’s a living, breathing example of how time changes things, how things have to change. How do you get the space to be more functional while preserving Julia’s spirit—the cookbooks she wrote there, the recipes she tested, the original intention of her kitchen—without losing the magic that’s there?
I think the best way to look at it is that we wanted to include and diverge simultaneously. Julia made French cooking accessible to an American audience. And knowing that she brought a new era of cooking to Americans, I thought, What is a way I can bring a new era of cooking to Americans? And that was part of the logic we followed in the pedagogical plan: building the school to center recipe-free cooking. Every once in a while, people get angry that we’re not doing more Julia-centric cooking. Julia has done her work, but I did want to make sure that the house remained this place of cultural food connections to France for Americans, because that’s very much what it was.
La Peetch
La Peetch
One of my and my husband’s roles is to be the historians of the property. I’m more the artistic visionary designer, and he’s making sure that we’re moving forward without staying deep-steeped in nostalgia. Because things do have to get painted, and it doesn’t necessarily make sense to keep it all the same. Holding onto nostalgia creates decay sometimes. If you’re trying to keep a wall the same and it’s falling down, well, you sometimes have to let that wall go and put up a new one.
Held’s book, Mostly French, will be released by Simon & Schuster in April 2025.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
More Great Celebrity Style Stories From AD
