Vintage Trader

Feature 13595069 | © living4media / Narratives / Darby, Brent | 21 images

For someone who lives amid a casual grandeur that could hail straight from a Bordeaux chateau, Collette has a refreshingly down-to-earth English attitude. She exudes an air of not quite believing her luck in landing this home, while her ‘been-in-the-family-for-generations’ French style has been artfully drawn together from dawn-raids on fairs across the Channel. What’s more, she whispers: ‘Don’t tell, but my French is actually a bit rubbish…’ Not so long ago the family was living in a far more ordinary Victorian semi in southeast London, until the spectre of redundancy from her City job delivered one of life’s wake-up calls.