Nadia Louyer de Villermay, owner of NLdeV Restoration, brings her traditional style and French accent to the furniture-fascinated residents of Westport.
“My workshop is dedicated to the conservation and restoration of furniture and gilded objects,” said de Villermay.
Trained in her craft in Paris at the Institute National des Formations Artistiques, de Villermay  apprenticed in Parisian restoration “ateliers,” which once turned out some of the finest furniture of Europe to fill the halls of Versailles and the Louvre.
She has been honored with the Deb Ziegler award for entrepreneurial excellence from the Stamford Woman”™s Business Development Center.
“A globe trotter for a good part of my life, I grew to appreciate the roles of our environment, traditions, and cultural patrimony,” said de Villermay. “Today, I bring continents a little closer together by using Old World techniques to preserve the New World”™s heritage.”
De Villermay moved to the states after marrying her now ex-husband, whose family she remains close with. Her son, Isaiah, is in ninth grade.
“I worked for an antique dealer in New York City and decided almost three years ago to open my own workshop,” said de Villermay. “I decided I needed something more grounded to the earth. I come from a family that had always loved and cared for furniture.”
De Villermay, who works exclusively with wood, follows her training strictly, always making her own material and only using the techniques that were used at the time pieces were created.
“If I”™m working on an early 20th-century piece, I”™ll only use materials and techniques in use at the time,” said de Villermay. “I”™m really about the traditional way.”
According to de Villermay, her specialties as well as the favorite parts of her work, are the fragile art of gold gilding and the traditional French polish.
“It”™s neck breaking, but it”™s fun,” she said. “My understanding of the restorer’s ethic informs my approach to my craft. I believe that any intervention must be guided by reflection, sensibility and absolute respect for the piece of art. But the personality of an object develops through time. And these developments must be respected, not erased.”
According to de Villermay, a furniture restorer must be discreet in execution, involving no irreversible techniques, while preserving as much as possible the past interventions that serve to identify the period and history of the piece.
De Villermay says that most of her clientele comes from Fairfield, Litchfield and Westchester, N.Y., counties and from New York City. Some clients are antique dealers, but many are individuals wary of the treatment their furniture will receive.
“America is about industrialization,” said de Villermay. “You have to work fast and well, but mostly fast. Though, when you have a 17th-century piece and you drop it in a bath of stripper, it will be clean, but there won”™t be much left on it. Not that there aren”™t American restorers that do a good job, but you need to know. It”™s much like a chiropractor or a dentist, you need someone whose been referred and you can trust.”
