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The renowned harpsichordist and conductor William Christie has spent his career breathing new life into French Baroque music, so it is not surprising that he took the same meticulous and creative approach to restoring his 16th-century house in France. Christie, who moved to France soon after graduating from Harvard, discovered the Vendée region to the southwest of Paris in 1974. "I loved that it was unspoiled, deep country not far from the sea," Christie recalls. He rented various houses for periodic escapes away from his flat in Paris, and then in 1985 bought Le Bâtiment, a house built in the 1500s for an aristocratic Protestant family.

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But it was far from grand by the time Christie laid eyes on the property. By 1630, the house was a tenant farm; cows lived in what is now the grand gallery, and chickens roosted in the upper floors. When Christie purchased it, "it was an unlived-in ruin," he says, "but with all these fireplaces and fabulous details."

With the same academic rigor that he brings to researching and renewing the operas that he presents at music festivals around the world, Christie dug into the history of the house and the region. Since the house is listed as a national historic monument, he worked with a state architect and local craftsmen to restore original details and re-create what had been lost. Some of the 15 rooms had no floors, so he hunted down tiles from the 17th century, finding the ones in the dining room when a nearby hospital was being renovated.

Strokes of genius came out of mistakes, like the moment when Christie became impatient with how long the renovation was taking and took a high-pressure hose to the ceiling to clean off the beams, only to realize that he had destroyed layers of decorative paint underneath. "That gave us the idea to give back to this house a whole scheme of decorative painting," he explains. Christie worked with the Nantes-based historian and artist François Roux, who painted all the trompe l'oeil details. The conductor knew Roux from his work on scenery for stage sets, and the two of them visited nearby châteaus for inspiration. Roux used natural pigments and the techniques of the 16th century, but added whimsy. To celebrate Christie's love for music and gardens, he painted musical instruments and garden tools on the beams.

Past and present mix in other ways as well. Christie's parents, who lived in Buffalo, New York, sent him containers of their furniture, mostly 19th-century American reproductions of 17th-century pieces by the furniture company Kittinger. They blend in beautifully with the original furnishings that he has collected over the years at auction. He had many chairs re-covered in velvet and damask from the celebrated French fabric houses of Prelle, Edmond Petit, and Lelievre. For the beds in the main bedrooms, he had a local upholsterer copy the canopy beds at the 16th-century Château de Chenonceau, which was the French royal residence during the period Le Bâtiment was built.

The garden surrounding the house followed a similar historical reconstruction: There wasn't even one originally, as the land had been used for grazing farm animals, so Christie, who had been studying gardens and sketching plans for decades, had a blank slate on which to create. "Gardens have been my second passion after music," he says. "I had long wanted to build one from scratch."

The result is a fanciful, eclectic garden that continues to evolve as he adds acres and elements. Its essential bones were inspired by 17th- and 18th-century French and Italian gardens, with an Arts and Crafts echo. (Dumbarton Oaks was an early influence.) The series of garden rooms includes a Red Garden just off the house's Red Gallery, the Cloister Garden, the Topiary Garden, a half-mile-long watercourse, and a theater for outdoor concerts. Yews clipped in the shape of chubby pagodas surround the performance space, adding an element of chinoiserie flair.

"The garden is very ambitious but very human," explains Christie. "The plots are big, but you also find yourself in wonderful contained spaces." Among the creatures that inhabit the garden are a pair of swans as well as white-tipped pigeons. Their home is a 16th-century dovecote that Christie heard was going to be destroyed because it lay in the path of a new autoroute; he had it dismantled and carted back to his property, where it was rebuilt—stone by stone.

Much to Christie's astonishment, his green masterpiece was recognized as such by the French government in 2006, when it was declared a Jardin Remarquable, the botanical equivalent of a national monument, and the first time a creator has been so honored during his lifetime since Monet and his Giverny.

"The garden is very personal and breaks all the rules," Christie says, "but I am immensely happy and proud of it. I spend as much time as I can here. I don't need to take vacations anywhere else."

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