By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

PETRUSHOVO, Russia

Searching for a retreat from her fast-pace life in Moscow during the 1990s, Irene Commeau, a French woman of Russian descent, accepted a friend’s invitation to visit his dacha in this village, about four hours’ drive from the Russian capital.

“What sold me on the place the first time I came here is that roosters walk the street,” Ms. Commeau said. And so do goats, judging from a recent visit, when Ms. Commeau and her gardener kept trying to keep wandering goats off the cabbage patch.

Today, Ms. Commeau, 55, has a 4.5-hectare (11-acre) estate here, with a 360-square-meter (3,875-square-foot) house that she created by bringing two early 20th-century wooden schoolhouses to the property. There also are the two wooden dachas, a guest house, a banya (Russian sauna), a stable, apple and pear trees, as well as grapevines and a stream.

Ms. Commeau, a native Parisienne, came to Russia in 1991 with her son, Maurice, then a teenager from her first marriage. Communism had fallen and she was in charge of opening the Moscow office of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Soon she married again, to the minister of oil and energy working for the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.

In 1995, enchanted by her visit to Petrushovo, Ms. Commeau bought the two ramshackle dachas and the land they stood on for the equivalent of $10,000. She was hooked on the village, although that fancy was not shared by her husband. He would rather go to Milan, she said, when first suggesting a trip to the village.

He had a point. At the time, there was no indoor plumbing or other modern conveniences. But “that’s what I like, that it’s another world here,” she said of Petrushovo.

The marriage did not last. But the estate did, and it is now her summer home, as well as a year-round weekend retreat from her Moscow apartment.

During the 1998 financial crash that rocked Russia, two nearby villages put their early 20th-century wooden schoolhouses up for sale. Ms. Commeau bought the pine structures for $1,200 each and, inspired by the book, “Life on the Russian Country Estate,” by Priscilla Roosevelt, she hired local builders to help her combine the structures into a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house.

They retained the original log walls and wooden rafters, but stripped the paint from the wide boards of the wooden floors.

The work took about two years. Then Ms. Commeau began filling the house with pieces she had picked up from around the world as well as just around the neighborhood, including a daybed from the Indonesian island Bali; Delft-like blue and white porcelain made in Gzhel, an artisans’ town on the road from Moscow; and a wardrobe inherited by Ms. Commeau’s grandmother, who lived in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution.

There also are touches of Ikea throughout. “Ikea fits in well if it’s in snatches,” she said of her design philosophy.

Instead of a door, a Soviet flag curtains off the kitchen. By Russian tradition, the kitchen is the heart of the home and during a recent visit the long table was covered with cauliflower, carrots, tomatoes and lettuce from the garden as well as goat’s milk, eggs and honey bought from neighbors. Ms. Commeau had a ceramic-tile stove built for the room. She also has a dishwasher.

The custom-built shelves in the living room hold thousands of books in French, Russian and English, including her father’s library, which she brought to Russia from Paris, and a photograph of Ms. Commeau with Mikhail Gorbachev.

She had a second floor added to the structure, a large space with many nooks and crannies and a ping-pong table in the center. There is a raised ceiling, to let in the light, and views of the village and surrounding fields from both sides of the room. Eight guest beds are tucked into various parts of the room because she and her children love guests.

Ms. Commeau has tried to make the estate resemble and feel like Abramtsevo, a 19th-century artists’ retreat outside Moscow. She has paintings by Russian artists hanging throughout the house and, for outdoors, she salvaged large silhouettes of chairs from a Moscow design show and placed them on the front lawn.

For one of the original dachas she hired a local carpenter to recreate the whimsical carved silhouettes of the porch railing at Leo Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

The second dacha has become a second home for her son Maurice, his Russian wife and their two toddlers, whose main home is in Paris. The children from her second marriage — a daughter, Nastia, and a son, Sasha — attend boarding school in England but spend their summers at Petrushovo.

Ms. Commeau estimates that, over the years, she has spent the equivalent of about $150,000 creating the estate, and was at the forefront of the recent trend of Muscovites building second homes in the area.

Land prices as well as labor cost go down dramatically if you go further out,” said Anya Levitov, a managing partner of Evans Real Estate, which has offices in Moscow and New York. She said land that is 100 kilometers (60 miles) or more from Moscow may sell for as little as $500 per 100 square meters (1,076 square feet).

In comparison, land in the elite Rublyovka suburb just outside Moscow sold for as much as $100,000 per 100 square meters before the financial crisis hit.

But the lack of infrastructure and amenities in rural areas, along with the complicated zoning regulations and security concerns, has deterred many city dwellers, Ms. Levitov said.

Ms. Commeau did have some difficulties herself. As a foreigner, she initially had to register the property and main house in the names of her construction foreman and cleaning lady. And she organized the homeowners in Petrushovo to install a central water system for the village. (The local mayor now works as her estate manager.)