In December 2001 they bought the place - the first home they ever owned - for 700,000 euros (then $623,700). Ms. Banks, who is originally from Maine; her husband, Pierluigi Mezzomo, who is from Italy; and their two sons, then 5 and 10, cleansed and blessed the place. They spent the next 18 months renovating it while they stayed in a rented apartment in Monaco.

 

The house's entryway is planted with palm and cyprus trees.
The 2,000 square foot property also has a number of fruit
trees that the family planted.

Menton, historically a popular landing spot for English expatriates, is the last town on the French Riviera before the Italian border, a 10-minute drive now from Ms. Banks’s front door. She and Mr. Mezzomo knew they wanted to be close to Italy, where they had lived for nine years after they were first married and where their children still feel at home. They also knew that they wanted the garden space they had not had in Monaco and the character of an old building, which can be hard to find in an area dominated by new development.

 

A view from a second-floor bedroom, looking out over
the rooftops to Menton toward Italy. The border is a
10-minute drive from the house.

The house - long ago named Villa Bois Joli, or Pretty Wood in French - was built in 1901 to replace one destroyed in an earthquake just before the turn of the century. Tiny tremors in the area still send new cracks creeping up the walls.

From the outside, the house looks much taller than its two stories, but that illusion is the result of the 3.5-meter-, or 11.5-foot-, ceilings inside as well as the utility space on the ground level. The house’s entrance is actually one flight up, at the top of a double exterior staircase.

 

The master bedroom. The house has four bedrooms,
each one with a view of the Mediterranean.

There are four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms and living and dining rooms off opposite doorways of the black-and-white-tiled entrance corridor. In total the house has 220 square meters (2,368 square feet) of living space. A small maid’s suite is attached off the back through a separate entrance.

Ms. Banks and Mr. Mezzomo updated the pale-blue shutters that accent the house’s white exterior and had the balustrade around a side courtyard rebuilt.

 

Stained glass windows in one of the house's 2.5 bathrooms.

Ms. Banks decorated the interior “after much of the living room and kitchen were dismantled and rebuilt” with antique touches from Italy and France. The bathroom tiles came from Tuscany; the light fixture in her office, with three delicate sconces, from a small shop in Nice.

The whole property, with its 185 square meters (2,000 square feet) of land, looks like a landscaped retreat for any creative soul. The family terraced and planted organic vegetable gardens and fruit trees on the steep hill behind the house, which rises to increasingly beautiful views of the sea. They now grow their own oranges, grapefruits, peaches, apricots, prunes, pears and figs. For other produce they travel the last Sunday of every month to an organic market in the valley town of Dolceacqua across the border in Italy.

 

The living room has a marble fireplace.

“The colors, the smells, the views, that’s what makes inspiration come,” Ms. Banks explained just before ordering several bottles of olive oil from a stall at the Sunday market. “And it comes a lot in that house.” Inside, she wanted a blue, a green and a red room. Then, when she ran out of rooms, she painted a downstairs closet red. Her study is the green room, its bookshelves packed liked the children’s department of a bookstore with dozens of colorful copies of her picture books and hardback editions of “Lenny’s Space,” her children’s novel published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Kate Banks's study. The glass-front bookshelves store copies of
her many children's books, some of which were written in the house.

Her writing - and the “thinking time” that goes into it - often occurs outside the study, all over the house. Sometimes it even occurs in the grotto, an ornamental structure built into the base of the terraced hill by a previous owner.

Source: NYtimes