Claude-Noëlle Toly Found Avignon on Bleecker Street

Photo: Michael Mundy

Nearly 40 years ago, Claude-Noëlle Toly noticed an ad for a third-floor walk-up in the ­window of a real-estate office in Greenwich Village. The initial listing wasn’t promising. The 275-square-foot studio had beat-up wooden floors and small windows, and what passed for a fireplace was a hole in the wall. There was no kitchen. Such a place used to be called a “handyman special.” No glamour; just nuts and bolts.

But, she saw, it overlooked a patch of green that reminded her of the village where she grew up in the south of France.

“As a country girl, I was attracted by the garden,” she says. Then she discovered something else. “The one thing that stood out, that was almost a come-hither look, was a ceiling beam straight out of a French farm. It is the only apartment in the building that has an exposed beam. Nobody has ever been able to tell me why that is. I saw it as a true hint that this apartment was meant for me.”

In time, her postage stamp on Bleecker Street came to resemble her own little ­Avignon. Toly — who sells antique Provençal furniture and pottery at Le Fanion, the shop on the corner of West 4th and Bank Streets that she co-owns with business partner ­William Nuckel — replaced the windows, created French doors, and installed a new balcony and terra-cotta floors.

“French terra-cotta is pricey,” she says. “So I found Mexican terra-cotta. There is one that has the paw of a dog. They leave them out to dry, and there is a little paw.”

Toly first visited New York in 1981 while hitchhiking cross-country with her then-­boyfriend. “It was the most amazing thing I have ever done in my life,” she tells me, reminiscing on her balcony one afternoon.

She returned to France, where she had earned a master’s in political science, but later came back to New York and worked as a waitress at Chez Brigitte, a long-forgotten French diner on Greenwich Avenue. There, she met Nuckel, and they decided to start an importing business together, which led to the opening of Le Fanion in 1987 inside a former grocery store. The two renovated the space, adding wood beams and a navy-and-white checkered floor. Around then, Toly was renting “a really funky apartment on Avenue A,” and it was Nuckel who ­suggested she buy the studio on Bleecker. “It was probably the best advice I ever ­received,” she says. “And followed!”

The décor. Most of furniture and objets come from Le Fanion.
Photo: Michael Mundy

The kitchen. There wasn’t one when Toly bought the studio. She added custom cupboards and a two-burner stove—“only because I wanted to fit a washing machine underneath.” Her mother approved of the decision, telling her, “Knowing you, two burners are probably enough.”
Photo: Michael Mundy

The mantel. To spruce up what originally passed for a fireplace, Toly found a mantelpiece covered with peeling wallpaper at her store. It wasn’t anything too special, but “it turned out that the scale was perfect for my hole in the wall,” she says. “Together with the border of handmade tiles, this ordinary mantelpiece added a great has-been-there-forever look.”
Photo: Michael Mundy

The balcony. The new windows and the French doors were made by two brothers who work in the old tradition of French carpentry
Photo: Michael Mundy

“The store was created to give me an excuse to travel backand forth to France,” Toly says. “It also gave me a source of decoration.”
Photo: Michael Mundy/2014

The floor. French terra-cotta tends to be costly. Claude-Noëlle Toly opted for Saltillo tiles from Country Floors, which still get the Provençal vibe across.
Photo: Michael Mundy

Claude-Noëlle Toly in her bedroom.
Photo: Michael Mundy