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.
Copper pots and pans were another signature fixture of a Julia Child’s kitchen.
Photo: Peter Jackson
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?