Garden Diaries: A Journey from the Arizona Desert to Rural Burgundy – How Kendall Smith-Franchini Grew an Idyllic Cookery School and Kitchen Garden Retreat in the French Countryside

When Kendall Smith-Franchini and her husband Laurent first saw their home, the Woodland House, 15 years ago, the real estate agent showed them the outside first – the yard, the orchard, the potential. As newlyweds looking for a place with some ground to work with, they were completely thrilled. It took a decade, however, for their garden dreams to come to life.

They had established The Cook's Atelier, the family's cooking school and culinary boutique in the heart of Beaune, France, a few years before buying their 1850s home, and were focused on building a lifestyle business with a farm-to-table ethos at its heart. From the very beginning, Kendell, her mother Marjorie, and Laurent worked closely with food producers in the Burgundy region to source the best local ingredients they could find.

Knowing they always wanted to get their own hands into the soil, five years ago the Atelier evolved again, and they finally created the kitchen garden they'd always dreamed of. The vision didn't stop there. The family also transformed a barn into an outdoor kitchen where guests can cook, and created a magical woodland dining area, building a retreat for students to discover and explore as part of their culinary learning. It's a long way from the Arizona desert where Kendall grew up, as she tells us here.

A French Idyll

I'm from Arizona, and so is my mom. And Arizona is by no means a place where you grow much of anything. It's a desert; not a lot of rain, not a lot of green.

We've always had this fascination for living in a place that had seasons, where you could actually grow food and flowers, and plant trees. That's always been the dream. And Burgundy in particular is really great because it's a blessed growing region with really good soil. We're surrounded by gardeners and farmers, not large industrial farms, but little tiny farms here and there everywhere. Some of them grow vegetables, some focus on fruit. It's a community of growers.

I was the Francophile in the family. My entire life, I said, 'I'm just moving to France.' I'd talk about it as a little kid, which my family teases me about all the time, because there aren't a lot of French-speaking people in Arizona, as you can imagine. But I was just determined. I studied art history, got interested in wine, and basically convinced everyone to move to Burgundy, including my husband, who's originally from the south of France.

My mom and I have been running The Cook's Atelier for 17 years now. As cooks, we've always been connected to the first roots of food. That's always been the backbone of what we do. It's been refreshing to be able to then live that – to grow what we cook, to show our guests where ingredients come from, to be part of this community of people who all have their little gardens or potagers.

Learning From the Community and The Land

The Woodland House sits in the countryside south of Beaune, along the route to the Grand Crus wine villages. It's a beautiful drive through vineyards and small towns.

The property itself is in a little valley with a creek running behind the house. We own part of the forest beyond, but a lot of it belongs to the tiny village. You can't construct anything on it, so the property feels much bigger than it really is. It's under two hectares, but it stretches into woodland.

We're really blessed with good soil. The climate is interesting. It's very rainy in Burgundy generally, especially in spring and fall, and it doesn't get really, really cold. We have a couple of snow days, but mostly we get frost, which can be tricky with the vineyards and fruit trees. A late frost can damage everything.

We actually don't need to water very often because it's so wet and moist here. In July and August, during the drought period, we're lucky because the little creek behind the house never goes dry. We can pump water from it if we need to, though very rarely do we need it even in summer.

We also have a lot of wildlife; blue herons, foxes, and deer. We're learning from the community too. Our neighbor taught us how to keep bees. We bring all the compost from the cooking school back to the garden. It's a very small team, and we wear many hats, but it's a passion we personally want to strive for, and it's nice to incorporate that into how our business functions, too.

We always had some sort of little variation of a garden over the years, but never anything grand. We work with really fabulous farmers and gardeners in Beaune who provide food for the cooking school, but we always wanted to give our hand at trying to grow ourselves too.

And five years ago, during the pandemic, we finally had the time. We have a green thumb, and we'd always wanted to plant our own garden. That was obviously the moment to do it.

We do the garden ourselves. And that's been fun because it's very much a learning curve. Every year, we're obviously learning. Every year is different.

We do a lot of companion planting, kind of basing it on permaculture principles. We grow mainly vegetables, but we also have a lot of fruit trees.

During the pandemic, we worked with an association that helps private homeowners preserve the heritage trees of the region, and we planted about 40 fruit trees. Among them are cherries, apples, pears, apricots, plums, persimmons, peaches, raspberries, and tons of currants.

The potager has a border of edible herbs that encircles the entire garden: chives, parsley, sage, rosemary, and lavender growing there. It's all edible, and it's year-round.

A Potager Garden with Family Soul

We have a thing for pumpkins, and we love the Cinderella pumpkins especially. We always try to do a mix of everything: lots of lettuces, lots of rocket, and Japanese greens. More variety than quantity, because every time we're serving guests, we want to have something different. So there are a lot of little tiny things going on.

It's definitely a mix of growing for taste and for beauty. We just recently got a little greenhouse, too.

We started so many little seedlings that first year, it was insane. They were all over the house, all over the place. Now we start some things from seed, and we're also really lucky because at the market and with farmers we visit, they also start little seed plants. It's a bounty. We share seeds with them sometimes, too.

The other thing that's really nice about our region is that even though it's very rural, there are a lot of international people. We have Greek people, Japanese people, and one of our favorite gardeners is a German guy who's constantly suggesting crops we should grow. We talk about seeds and techniques, and then we figure it out.

We're so busy during the week working that Sundays are our garden days. It's a family affair when we have garden days and everybody shows up, including my three children. Lucas is fourteen, Manon is twelve, and Lou is six. We try to make sure they're involved somehow. Their attention spans aren't huge, but we do try to make sure they're in the garden a little bit.

When we started five years ago, we made sure Luc had his little section. He's into native plants and trees, so he had his 'Three Sisters' bed – corn, beans, and pumpkins – which he is in charge of. Manon, the middle one, was always into cornichons. And Lou, the littlest, loved strawberries, so she had her little strawberry patch. We still continue that. We still try to have them make sure they're interested.

A garden day is basically a mix of everything; harvesting, weeding, and planting. We try to do it as often as we can, so it's not one big overwhelming task. And then usually what happens after we get through that part is we end with a big, nice family lunch. We sit outside at the barn, and it's a lovely reward.

Learning as we Grow – Mistakes and Revelations

We've had our fair share of learning experiences. Our very first year, like every new gardener, we planted way too many zucchini. We were so excited. But we didn't get one zucchini because we ate all the flowers before they could fruit.

We learn a lot from our guests too. Many of them are quite good gardeners. I remember one time a guest named Dee said to us, 'Ladies, you can't plant your eggplants away from each other. They all have to be together because that's how they pollinate.' I've learned a lot this way.

And every year we're learning something new. We've had our fair share of rogue squash growing up the compost pile because we forgot to add enough manure to the compost. That's a learning curve. But there are always little things like that. Every year you do get better the more you do it, and that's been fun.

I think in the beginning, when you first start, you're a little bit more rigid about things. But the more you do it, you just kind of ease into it and let the garden do its thing.

Sometimes the cosmos come back in a different area than I planted them the previous year, but they come back the next year and I just leave them because I like them. I just let it do what it wants in a way. It makes it easier for you, and it just looks more beautiful, I think, when you just let it take on its own life and personality.

It's nice to be able to show our guests the act of growing some of the food we cook. It doesn't have to be grandiose. We talk about that the entire week with them during our five-day masterclass programs.

After four days cooking in town at the Atelier, the last day is a little bit more relaxing in the countryside, and more lifestyle-focused. We gather at the Woodland House, which is quite a treat for guests who come from all over the world. They get to be in the country, see the gardens, see the chickens, see the bees, all that stuff.

The barn kitchen, which we renovated just this past winter, is where we bring people to enjoy cooking and eating outdoors. It brings everything together. We often tell guests that it's meant to be a little bit of inspiration; it doesn't have to be a big, grandiose thing.

Getting Better, Season by Season

I think the goal is to get better at doing this and to be more of a seasoned gardener with more experience.

I'd also like to get better at creating more little nooks and niches in and around the wooded area. There are already a lot of little areas around the wooded part by the creek that have natural flowers, especially in spring, wild violets, primroses, things like that.

I think we could plant more bulbs, create little sections on the property that have a certain meaning or little experiences. Even in a small area, there's always room to change things, improve, and grow.

What's really lovely about the Woodland House is that it brings together everything we love about France. It's a place of gathering. And now, when people come from all over the world, we all gather here. It's very much this really idyllic French countryside location.

We're really proud of what we've created. We were brave in the sense that we just jumped headfirst into it. And I think once you grow something from seed and then enjoy the process of cooking it and eating it – even in a small form – it's really rewarding.

You can discover even more stories and techniques from The Cook's Atelier cooking school in their debut cook book, available from Amazon.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.