Our story

We came to the Alpilles for one house. Alain had been designing and building fine houses in Geneva for thirty years; Liliana designed their interiors, from the proportions of a room to the details that matter. We went up and down these roads on foot, on horseback, by bicycle and by motorbike, and we kept stopping at the same gates: an old mill behind its plane trees, a sheepfold against a rock, a village house with its stable still standing. Solid houses, built to last, and falling down all the same.

Le Mas de Chabran was the first. We had hoped to buy it for years, and when at last it was ours, it was a house asleep: whole parts of it we had not even explored, gardens that had almost gone back to the wild, and in the vaulted room where the oil was once kept, the date 1738 still cut into the stone. It was far too big for us. We asked ourselves what we would do with it, and the answer came on its own: open it, receive people here, and share with them what we love about France and about Provence. A year of work, day and night, and in 2019 the first guests arrived. We never left, and the masons who rebuilt it are the ones who rebuilt the houses that followed.

Reading the deeds, we found the houses already knew each other. The foreman of the Chabran mill before 1914 was called Fléchon, like the hamlet where our second house stands. A farming family of Mouriès owned both the village house that became Le Respelido and a house at Fléchon. Six of the eight stand in the old Terre des Baux; two look at the Alpilles from Eygalières. Without meaning to, we had put a family of houses back together.

The last to open its doors asked the most of us. When we first saw Mas Cagalou, about ten years ago, it was a ruin behind the pines, the Alpilles rising straight behind it: no roof, no windows, no reason to believe. We looked at each other and already knew. Then came years of waiting for a permit that might never come, and craftsmen we trusted with a house only we could see. One morning we walked through the finished door and understood: it had never been a ruin. It had only been waiting for someone to love it back.

What we do with them is simple. We put each one back in the materials it was built from and add nothing it would not have had. Then we hand it over, whole, to one party at a time: a family, or friends who have known each other long enough to share a table for a week. Ven, Liliana’s sister, runs the houses and knows everyone for miles around. Quentin cooks what the market gives on Wednesday. The gardeners have been here longer than some of the trees.

Our hope is this: that you arrive and nobody asks you to sign anything; that by the third day you know the gardener’s name; and that you come back in a month no one thinks of, when the postcard is put away and the Alpilles are at their best.