Incredibly charming village house for sale in Provence

Today I am incredibly excited to share with you an absolutely perfect maison de village that is for sale here in Provence.
Now, I am not going to try and hide it from you, I am incredibly biased as I LOVE THIS HOUSE. I think that you will too…
Isn’t it romantic? 
It currently belongs to my friend Anthony, who has decided to sell it in order to help fund the renovation of his newest project, which you will hear about soon. The house is 120 m2 (about 1300 square feet) with three bedrooms, two baths and a private courtyard. 
But let’s step inside, shall we?
The salon features a working fireplace that was designed by the current owners and the feeling here is cozy to the extreme. Anthony and his partner were both agreed on one thing: to keep all of the amazing patina in tact during the renovation. And as that meant respecting le style ancien, the walls are covered in either a worked plaster or lime-wash.
I have been in this room both in the height of summer, where it stays cool and in winter, when it stays warm. This is exactly what the best of these stone houses are capable of! Windows open onto the small street outside both in the living room…
…and the kitchen and yet the feeling of privacy remains.

I love the mix of modern and ancient – another concept that was very important to the couple – seen here in the polished cement floors and the amazing kitchen tiles. These were made in the traditional manner in North Africa using pigments measured out in jam jars to give them the perfect/imperfect look that is the overriding theme throughout.

Amazingly, the arch just off the kitchen – as with the foundations – dates from the early 17th century! It leads to the only toilette or WC in the house.
Look at the patina in the ceiling! *swoon* Anthony told me that blue was often used in Provence to chase away mosquitos and other insects.
Let’s head up to the first floor…
…but feel free to pause and take in the view.
To the right is the lovely bedroom that you have already seen up top…
…with its shower (to the right) and fabulous deco-style sink that originally came from a barbershop in St. Remy de Provence…
…not to mention a decorative fireplace. As with the other features such as the doors, it is the original from the 18th century. All of the windows were painstakingly taken down, restored and remounted!
I would just add that this bedroom is bigger than the photos suggest and could also make for a really lovely sitting room/library.
Next door (and speaking of doors, look at the iron handle on this one), is a smaller bedroom…
…still with those gorgeous original tiles, so much more interesting (and rare!) than the hexagonal terra cotta tomettes
…plus a little stone-framed niche in one corner, just because.
All right, let’s head up one more short flight of stairs for the pièce de résistance
Voila! The top floor is one huge room (50 m2 or 531 square feet) with exposed beams and double exposition…
…plus an open suite. As throughout, the robinets or taps are by Czech and Speake.
As the room is so large, there is enough space to transform some or all of it into a roof terrace if so desired. 
But it is already a very sunny house…
…and directly across the tiny street is…
…your very own private courtyard. It is not large but big enough for a table, some chairs and a bbq…
…everything needed to make a Provençal dream come true!
One last thing that I appreciate about this house (besides the jasmine blooming on the facade) is that it is on a corner, which means that it is not as hemmed as could be and has both Northern and Western exposure. 
Anthony has had great success in renting this house as a vacation home and there is a trust-worthy cleaning woman available if the future owners are interested in doing the same. As this house is in Provence, there is great demand for rentals nearly all year round.
It is located in a typical Provençal village that has all of the necessities (supermarket, pharmacy, doctor and nurses, gas station, cafés and pizzeria) that is a 15 minute drive from the Avignon TGV station (which means only a two and a half hour direct train ride to/from Paris) and just over one hour drive to the closest international airport in Marseille.
Asking price: 185,000 Euros 
(I feel that this is a steal for this part of Provence)
If you are interested, please contact Anthony directly at: an**************@ho*****.com
Yes, he speaks English et mais bien sur, il parle bien français.


Please feel free to pass this post along to anyone that you know who might be looking to acquire an incredibly charming maison de village in Provence. As I have said, I love this home and simply hope that it will find the perfect new owner!

Paris blur

Yesterday morning the fog covered the hills above the village like a cupped hand. Everything was a bit muted, even the birds seemed to be humming under their wings. It took me back to my few hours roaming through Paris not so long ago.
For then too it was a gray day but my heart began pumping it with color so that I was painting outside the lines. 
You see, I had a friend to meet. Isn’t it something…an anticipation that builds until it whirls like a carrousel?
I could hardly focus on my surroundings but focus I did or at least I tried. To see Paris for Paris’ sake…

…and that meant taking in not one but two art exhibitions in the space of nearly as many hours.

It was exceptional to see the City of Light as loved by the photographers of the Magnum collective. So many of the city’s most classic moments were captured and defined by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson that I felt floating free in a past where I felt I belonged despite having never been.
It was a bit of time out of time until I stepped outside the Hotel de Ville and was reminded of recent events that had shocked the world, putting me smack back into 2015.
And yet La Conciergerie was mere steps away and I could nearly hear Marie Antoinette crying to be freed from her prison cell there…
…or Audrey Hepburn joyously shouting “Take the picture! Take the picture!” while floating past The Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre.
Is this why we love Paris? 
It is the host to so many of our stories – the imaginary, the real or those dancing in-between.
All we have to do is somehow place ourselves in that unique landscape, put a finger to the wind and pull on the blur.
As the night shrouded Paris in the fogs opposite, I boarded the train for Provence. 
The doors to the TGV slid together, shutting sound and the wheels rolled out until I couldn’t hear them anymore. I took my camera out of my bag and set it in my lap. It held my story – or at least what it had been for those few hours. My cheek felt cool against the window as the bright lights dissolved. Paris was letting me go.
Au revoir,” I whispered. Until we meet again.

Modern ceramics in Provence at Sophie Lassagne – Arles

One of the aspects that I miss most about living in the center of Arles is the delight I would feel upon walking out my front door on the rue de la Liberté (Liberty Street!) and seeing all of the shopkeepers with whom I had become friendly over the years. They each have their own fabulous characters – Alex at the Cuisine de Comptoir, Christine Millerin at her eponymous boutique and certainly, the incredibly talented ceramicist, Sophie Lassagne. I held a certain amount of pride about living amongst the les endroits les plus branchés de la ville – especially as they are run by such wonderful people. 
Sophie opened up her atelier at about the same time that Remi and I launched our gallery. That is how we met actually. But she had already become well-established in Provence by founding her previous workshop in St. Remy some twenty years earlier. It was a smashing success and yet she – as we did (and do) – believed in the artistic future of Arles and so made the leap to her current space. From what she has said, she doesn’t regret the change in the least and has certainly been warmly welcomed by the local community as well as those visiting Arles as her work is – tout simplement – exceptional.
But I will let her motivation speak for itself. 
From her artist’s statement:
“At the roots of my inspiration stands my childhood, in-between Asia and Africa, where have been woven the opposites. Hands deep in the clay, I have been wandering and seeking for a balance at the heart of their vital energies.
On the shelves of my studio, I have the feeling that I recognize the subtle blend of their singularity, the emergence of a harmony between a useful piece of work and a purely artistic research, between the fluidity and the mineral material, and between the lightness and the colourful density of what I am creating.
These thoughts invite me to follow my path, in a delicate balance between the rigors required by working with the soil, its generosity, and the purity of the lines and the curvy contours of my pieces of work.”
Et en français :
“Aux sources de mon inspiration l’enfance, entre l’Asie et l’Afrique où se sont tissés tous les contraires. Les mains plongées dans l’argile, j’ai cheminé à la recherche d’un équilibre au cœur de leurs forces vives.
Sur les étagères de mon atelier aujourd’hui, il me semble reconnaître l’alliance de leur singularité, l’émergence d’une harmonie entre une œuvre utilitaire et une recherche purement artistique, entre la fluidité et le minéral de la matière, la légèreté et la densité lumineuse des couleurs que je crée.
Une évidence qui m’invite à continuer sur le chemin, dans ce lent balancement, entre la rigueur qu’impose le travail de la terre, ses exigences et ses largesses, la pureté de ses lignes et la générosité de ses rondeurs.”

Amazing, non
Provence is a far more complex region than the clichés lead us to believe and Arles is doubly so. But Sophie passes beyond the obvious…by taking a bit of the brutal sun and the gentle glow of the evening light, a bit of the fierce Mistral winds but also the douceur of a perfect day, the shades of the ancient past and the energy building for the future…then adding it all together and distilling the essence down to something sublimely zen…but never too precious to be used for everyday.
She uses nothing but the most traditional methods, materials and pigments as well her own glazing technique which she developed to bring out a pearly luminescence in her finished pieces.

And yet, despite this elegance, everything remains at prices that are incredibly affordable. “I want it to be so that anyone who wants to buy something can,” she admitted to me affably. 
And that, along with the variety and gorgeousness of her pieces, is why she has become the go-to source for gifts of all shapes and sizes in Arles.
Such accessibility is also an extension of Sophie’s personality. She is nearly always in her atelier, working away…
…the door is usually open and the radio on. At times, she is in the midst of coaching a few lucky students but she will always pause to wave or say Hello. 

And blissfully, there is not an overworked cigale or olive motif in sight. No, no, the afore-mentioned clichés were swept out the door long before she lit the kiln for the first time in Arles.
For Sophie is a true artist. One who works to please herself…

…and in doing so, makes a lot of others happy in return.
Sophie Lassagne
Céramiste
12 rue de la Liberté
13200 Arles
Tel. +33 (0)6 67 09 47 50
Email: co*****@al******.com
A note to my designer friends, while Sophie does not ship internationally herself, she is willing to work with your shipping company. 

And to everyone – I hope it goes without saying that this is in no way a sponsored post, I am just delighted to talk about an artist whose work I truly believe in!
PS. Thank you for all of your kind comments and emails concerning my previous post…

Little and Big, 3.5

The postman was waiting in front of the gate as I returned with the dogs from our morning walk. He is a funny character in his way. Youngish – the -ish being key – and with a laid back air that I find frequently in the postal workers here. Often he is smoking a cheroot as he makes his rounds, sometimes he stops in at the neighbor’s for a coffee, today he was wearing boxy skater style shorts. “Colis pour vous,” he said with an upward nod as if to clarify that it was indeed for me and not the dogs. “Encore?” But we weren’t expecting anything…My eyes started to water up as soon as I saw my Mom’s handwriting on the label, so I quickly thanked him and called out a “Bon Weekend” before stepping into the shade of the kitchen. With a swift draw of the kitchen knife, the box was open and I was pulling out its contents as if they were delicate treasures. I found several articles from the NY Times magazine that I had missed and a super colorful makeup bag from Clinique filled with moisturizers, eye shadows and lipsticks. The card was short, “…to cheer you up…” and then, of course, the tears, happy ones, really started to flow. To be so loved and cared for, from so far away and with a ghost of that umbilical cord that still links us. She knows that we have been going through a hard time and that this gift would be a wonderful luxury to me and she was right. I wiped my eyes with a paper towel and smoothed on one of the lipsticks to pucker my lips with a pop.
Two days ago, a box of similar size had been delivered by the same postman, who happened to be sporting bright turquoise track pants and scuffed sneakers for the occasion. That too was an utter surprise but it was not only for me. Rather the postcard (of one of my favorite vintage Vogue covers no less) was addressed, “Hello, Miss, Mister and the Hounds!” Inside were two jars wrapped in crackly gold paper. One contained my friend Jennifer’s famous marmalade. She had won a silver medal with it this year and knows how we crave it. In the other she had made jam…for Kipling. It is a long-standing joke between us concerning the time when Mr. Rascal ate the entire bowl of gariguettes, the finest strawberries in the South of France, in mere seconds while we weren’t looking. We call him the Strawberry Thief – although based on a recent event that still rankles I may well change his nickname to The Cookie Monster.

On Wednesday afternoon I was invited to go for a walk with C, who lives here in the village. She is an inspiring woman, a single Mom with a full time job and we don’t get to see each other very often. But she does read my blog from time to time and had thought of me as there was a corner of the near countryside which I perhaps did not know that might be interesting to photograph. She was right. We headed out at a brisk pace, our voices overlapping in equally rapid exchanges of conversation with me only stopping to wheeze at times due to the falling pollen. “Oh, just last week this entire field was covered with apple blossoms,” she said with disappointment as we arrived at our destination. But that was fine, more than fine. There was so much beauty everywhere and she has the eye to see it then point it out. I discovered so much if not necessarily what she had hoped. Afterwards, she invited me back to her spotless kitchen and I watched as she prepared for us a tonic green juice. It gave me strength, literally, as if I were Popeye downing cans of spinach, just as had the pleasure of her fine company.
And so today I am thinking of the power of kindness. These three lovely women did acts that were probably small for them (although I have to add that it cost my Mom a pretty penny to mail that box from the States) but are really big for me. Huge, even. Similarly, I have two internet friends (both male, so as not to imply that thoughtfulness is only an inherent feminine quality) that have been sending out frequent words of encouragement because sometimes an “I believe in you, everything is going to work out,” goes a long, long way. With the weekend in front of me, I am wondering what good I can do to pay it forward. But then again, it is probably best not to overthink it too much just as, I imagine, these women didn’t either. Life will whisper me the way.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone…

Lumières: Carte-blanche à Christian Lacroix, Musée Cognacq-Jay – Paris, Part two



To read my initial post on this exhibition, please click: here.

“What if beauty was something that you could hold in your hands? Not a beautiful object but the idea of it? What might that be? Would it be heavy or light?” These are some of the questions that I took with me as I walked away from the Musée Cognacq-Jay’s sublime exhibition Lumières: Carte-blanche à Christian Lacroix. Wanting to dig beyond my initial, not-exactly transient joy after having swept through the many silk-shod rooms, I turned my thoughts questioningly towards the designer himself.

From the museum’s Press kit:

Christian Lacroix

Visions of the Enlightenment

What is your perspective on the Age of Enlightenment and how has it influenced your work?




“My perspective on the Age of Enlightenment is simply that of someone who is passionate about that era…I can only gratefully advocate everything that the Enlightenment brought about in terms of social progress, political thinking, the fight against obscurantism, tolerance and a thirst for knowledge, as demonstrated by the encyclopaedists. All the more so given that, paradoxically, this seemingly unshakeable knowledge, these foundations that were thought to be the definitive basis of modern societies were suddenly undermined, disputed and denied in the early 21st century. If only for these reasons, it is interesting to make these connections between the 18th century and our own times… From 1880 to 1910, people were expected to live in accordance with good taste – that is, past tastes – as the middle class post-Napoleon III adopted the style of the pre-Revolution enlightened aristocracy. I must confess that, beyond my appreciation and respect for the Age of Enlightenment, I am not impervious to all the rococo froth it created and inspired in the second half of the 19th century and beyond, with the somewhat risqué ‘marquise’, ‘shepherdess’ style, which was basically bourgeois and borderline kitsch. Contemporary artists often look back upon the 18th century from this angle.”




Elsewhere, Mr. Lacroix admitted that the period’s most obvious influence on his work can be seen in his deep appreciation of costumes – both within his former haute couture designs (as I have mentioned previously, his famous “pouf” skirts of the 1980s were basically 18th century dresses chopped in half) as well as in his theatrical work. And indeed, costumes are used throughout the exhibition to punctuate each room’s particular persona. This fascination with outer presentation goes hand in hand with the creation of the individual, one of the Age of Enlightenments overriding themes. 

I returned to this once dusty museum looking for the Romance of another time or maybe of another me but older now, I found that yes, my heart would still rise up like Fragonards’s girl on “The Swing” but also that my mind was solidly rooted down in the importance of freedom that the Age of Enlightenment helped to promote.

Flipping this little bit of gold up in the air, I let it fall smilingly palm to palm as I was happy – at least in this instance, hopefully in others – to look at both sides of the same intricate coin. 



Musée Cognacq-Jay
8, rue Elzevir
75003 Paris

The exhibition is now closed and the museum will reopen on May 9th, 2015.

Open 10am – 6pm
Closed Mondays. 
Unfortunately, the museum is not at all accessible to those with reduced-mobility.
There is app for the exhibition en français. If you are interested, see here.

For more information about the museum in English: click here.

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