"Napa for me is about quiet," Cunningham says. Meanwhile, she appointed the space with antiques she found at Parisian flea markets and rustic furniture by local designer Erin Martin.
#Formal attire french laundry restaurant windows
They preserved the casement windows and wood detail while raising the ceilings and removing walls to create an airy, loftlike bedroom upstairs. Though her ideal would be a "glass house with concrete floors-I'm a minimalist at heart," she and Keller were careful to stay true to historical precedent when renovating the cozy 1890s abode.
"I am definitely the aesthetic police of the company," she jokes.īack in Napa, Cunningham brings that same attention to the couple's home. (Her formal title is restaurant consultant.) She has perfected the decor and the functioning of the restaurants down to the last detail-from helping to develop custom Christofle silver flatware for Per Se to hiring a New York City Ballet alum to train the servers in spatial awareness and movement. In each of those lives, though, she is the curator of the Keller empire. "I kind of have three different lives in three different places," Cunningham says. Today, Cunningham divides her time between Yountville, California-where she and Keller share a remodeled Victorian carriage house in the shadow of their flagship restaurant-and Los Angeles and New York, where she attends to that holy grail of fine dining Per Se and a group of Bouchon restaurants and bakeries as well as other eateries. "It was really the beginning of this relationship, which really wasn't supposed to be a relationship," she says with a laugh. In fact, the two met when Keller hired Cunningham to help with the restaurant when he took over in 1994. Cut to the present day, when she's firmly ensconced there as a crucial collaborator in the Napa-based dining empire of her fiancé, chef Thomas Keller, who has famously helmed legendary restaurant the French Laundry for nearly 20 years. "I grew up in Napa Valley and went to school at Berkeley, and I swore I'd never come back," the striking brunette says. Despite the many charms of Napa Valley, from the rolling vineyards to the landmark restaurants, it's the one place where California native Laura Cunningham was sure she did not want to settle.
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