The Eighteenth-Century Room (left): The previous owner had painted over the delicate boiserie walls with bright-blue paint. The huge chandelier is late-twenties French. The wall sconces are late-nineteenth-century French and signed “Mottheau (Paris).”

The Observatory (right): “Pigeons,” Yohannan answers, when asked what was in the tower room when he bought the castle. “The windows were all knocked out, and there was plastic blowing in the breeze.” He wanted to create a room that might have been in Around the World in Eighty Days; the idea for the wall treatment came from a trunk he saw in Paris that was finished with nail heads and copper. He found the nails and rivets in Morocco and covered the walls in copper, mica, and nail heads.