Designer Michelle Nussbaumer Tranforms a Centuries-Old Chalet Into the Ultimate Holiday Retreat
A neighbor has hiked up a snowy incline to visit Michelle Nussbaumer, the Dallas-based decorator, at her mountain escape in Gstaad, Switzerland. The neighbor is resplendent in a velvety fur coat—perfect for this chilly day—the color of a fawn. She takes careful steps, inching ever closer until she reaches a terrace at the Nussbaumer house, a storybook chalet, all espresso-huge plank siding, and deep green shutters. Nussbaumer would offer her visitor some hot chocolate or steaming tea—but she might prefer munching on the hillside’s cold, crunchy grass instead.
The neighbor is a giant Swiss cow named Cindy, and she lives at the farm just down the mountain. Such is the country life—cow visits, sleigh rides, snowy picnics—of Nussbaumer, proprietress of Ceylon et Cie, a capacious showroom back in bustling Dallas jammed with globally gathered antiques and the designer’s own line of boisterous fabrics and curvy furniture. The Nussbaumers have been coming to Gstaad for nearly 30 years. Husband Bernard is from Switzerland, and the couple's children went to a Swiss boarding school. This chalet, though, is a much more recent find, a country alternative to a previous house in town that the family inhabited for almost 20 years. Its farmhouse authenticity—it was built in 1739 and has barely changed—captivated the designer. “We looked for an old chalet for so long,” Nussbaumer says. “It’s really hard to find them because people have torn them down and built even bigger ones.” The house has nearly 300 years’ worth of stories within its seasoned walls; the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók even wrote a divertimento in it in 1939, as a solitary houseguest.
Decorating the treasure was a snap for Nussbaumer, between her fabric-and-furniture workroom in the U.S., the beloved furnishings from the previous Gstaad house, and her incessant hunting and gathering. She is known for it—in Dallas, India, Morocco, Mexico, and Switzerland. For this house, she mixed and mismatched it all: wildly patterned fabrics (signature Ceylon et Cie offerings), English pieces, Spanish plates, Swiss furniture, French paintings, Chinese porcelain, Moroccan bowls.
For drama and depth in the low-ceilinged rooms, she had photographs of antique paintings transformed into wall-hung tapestries. She whirled together colors and cultures, no rules followed. A plump 1940s French armchair was upholstered in fluffy Mongolian fur. English chairs were covered in a fabric named for the wife of a Turkish sultan. “I wanted to do something different for this house,” Nussbaumer says. “I wanted to make it more modern.” The result is an ongoing scrapbook of the family’s lives, one in which the pages especially fill up at Christmastime.
No matter where the Nussbaumers scatter during the year, they all know to be in Gstaad for the holidays. “Nothing ever changes,” Michelle says. “It’s stuck in time here—and in a good way.” The exterior is festooned with fragrant garlands, fresh from the firs in the hills. The dining room chandelier brims with vibrant red flowers. Family and friends zigzag through the cozy rooms. There are dinners, tree-lighting parties, and sleepovers. And on many a snowy day and night, there is hot chocolate served in a charming wood teahouse, just downhill from the chalet. Cindy the cow does not know what she is missing.
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This article originally appeared in the November/December 2014 issue of VERANDA. Interior and landscape design by Michelle Nussbaumer; photography by Melanie Acevedo; produced by Carolyn Englefield; written by Rob Brinkley.
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