A small eighteenth-century town house with a patio, nestled on a calm, elegant street in the heart of the old Provençal town of Tarascon - ref 307542
A small eighteenth-century town house with a patio, nestled on a calm, elegant street in the heart of the old Provençal town of Tarascon.
Tarascon is a charming, vibrant Provençal town. It is well known for its rich architectural heritage, such as its medieval royal chateau, which is now a centre for contemporary art. Its famous Sainte-Marthe royal collegiate church, a Romanesque edifice, also stands out for its historical interest.
The town offers two middle schools, including a private one, a secondary school, a hospital and a range of shops. From its train station, you can reach all the surrounding towns by rail. It is also ten minutes from Arles train station, from where you can get to Paris by high-speed rail. And it is fifteen minutes from the high-speed rail stations of Avignon and Nîmes and only forty minutes from the city of Marseille and its international airport.
From the fifteenth century, the prosperity of Tarascon drew many families: aristocrats as much as merchants and upper middle classes. Clergymen also came. These newcomers built grand private houses: they were keen to leave their mark on the town. The town houses of Tarascon often display rich architectural embellishments in the style of Provençal Mannerism, which dominated in the seventeenth century. But some of these town houses were also plain and small. Since the Middle Ages, town houses have been defined as simply urban dwellings occupied by single owners, so their size does not really determine their category.
It was mainly from the eighteenth century onwards that small town houses - those with a floor area of less than 300m² - were built along commercial streets within Tarascon itself, where they were sheltered from the cold mistral wind of winter and from the hot sun of summer. They were made for wealthy merchants rather than for nobility and their style differs to that of grand, sumptuous palaces. The bombings of the Second World War damaged Tarascon but left almost all these old town houses intact: these historical dwellings were not close to the town's strategic rail line, nor to the bridge across the River Rhône.
These homes were often built upon ruins from the Middle Ages or antiquity and they all adopted a similar layout. Moreover, they are all made of the same fine materials: old monk-and-nun tiling, large tiles of grey Barbentane stone, wrought-iron window railings and walls made of limestone from the quarries of Les Baux-de-Provence and Fontvieille. Furthermore, they often reused fragments of column shafts from antiquity. Indeed, reuse of materials from the old remains upon which they were built is a constant feature among them.
The town houseThe house stands on the north-east side of an elegant street in the town centre that is shaded in the summer. Its facade is made of dressed stone from Les Baux-de-Provence and of reused stones. Tall, large windows stand to the left of a wooden entrance door that opens beneath an arched stone lintel. Two levels lie above the ground floor. The windows' original wooden shutters - including their catches, hinges and bolts - have been preserved, restored and painted in the traditional blue tone of the local Camargue region.
A sculpted votive niche can also be seen in the facade, but it no longer contains a statue. There was no sacrilege in this removal: a former owner simply wanted to take the protective statue with him when he moved house as he was attached to it.
The ground floor
A thick double entrance door of solid oak beneath a fanlight behind wrought ironwork leads into a spacious hallway with a floor of Barbentane stone tiles and a French-style beamed ceiling. It connects to a living room with a ceiling that is identical to that of the hallway. This living room is filled with natural light from two street-side windows, each protected by shutters and ...
