“Cozy,” though it can range from an old school cabin in the woods to a city apartment done up in Grandmillennial style, is pretty well understood. Charm is something else. One might say charm is the thinking person’s cozy. Case in point? Iza Przepiórska’s getaway in the Polish countryside.
Sweetly situated and utterly bucolic – the nearest tiny town is six miles away, and Przepiórska has but one neighbor – her second home is a former schoolhouse built in the 1920s. The property was in sad shape when this advertising creative first saw it. But as it was situated in the Drawskie Lake District, surrounded by hills, meadows and beech forest – and far closer to her Warsaw home than the vacation places she had been renting in France and Spain – she signed on. Working without an architect and supervising the project herself, Przepiórska set about redoing the interior, searching out old doors and hardware, demolishing a wall, bricking up a doorway and relocating the kitchen and bathroom. She also went to work on the garden, cleaning up the pond, ripping out a jungle of weeds and planting trees and lilac bushes.
Cozy is often conjured through a keen attention to purely decorative detail, a love of little bits and bobs. Nostalgia often plays a role, and rooms are frequently arranged to tell a story. Charm is more straightforward, less self-conscious. The charm of Przepiórska’s redbrick retreat lies in its seeming effortlessness. There is clearly an eye at work here, and a sense of proportion pervades these spaces. But no indication of great aesthetic exertion, no impressive effort of calculation. A pail is a pail. A pew is a bench. A farmhouse table and a motley collection of bentwood chairs looks so wonderfully serviceable. Paired with a rather rustic wingback chair, two vaguely Scandinavian armchairs set fireside come off as a place to sit, not a midcentury moment.
To outfit her bucolic getaway, Przepiórska brought a few pieces from her city apartment, then trawled the internet and made the rounds of local – and not so local – flea markets and antique stores. One of her favorite finds is a bathtub manufactured more than a century ago. She discovered it at an antique store 250 miles away. “And I had to arrange to transport it to a restoration expert at the other end of Poland,” describes Przepiórska. “This was expensive, but it was worth it. It’s beautiful. And it holds heat for a long time.” A local carpenter built her bed from beams lying in the attic. A chest of drawers in the living room came from a friend, and most of the paintings in the house are the work of another friend, the Gdańsk-born artist Leszek Skurski.
As with people, charm in a home comes quietly. Unlike the hale fellow well met, it doesn’t grab your hand and clap you on the back or speak too animatedly or dare you not to be spellbound. Emanating from every corner, it slowly envelops one. It doesn’t declaim or assert, it operates free of big gestures. Przepiórska’s home charms, but it was not designed to charm. And that is charm itself.
Photography by Marcin Grabowiecki / Alicja T.
Styling by Eliza Mrozińska
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