“Paradise in Provence” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the September 2004 issue of Vogue.
For more of the best from Vogue’s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.
The guest book of Janet de Botton's dazzling manse in the South of France says it all. Within its Florentine-paper bindings the Red Hot Chili Peppers' anarchic Anthony Kiedis finds an unlikely page mate in the form of dream jeweler Joel Rosenthal of JAR. A sketch by Damien Hirst of a female torso, with fresh-hacked limbs sprouting fountains of blood, is a startling thank-you that jostles eulogies from some of the haute monde's most exacting boldfaced names. But perhaps the rococo volutes of decorator and society scribe Nicholas Haslam's script, wittily paraphrasing Cole Porter, best evoke the magic of the house and its chatelaine:
“It's delightful, it's delicious, It's de South of France, it's de paradise, It's de Botton, it's de-best, it's de-luxe, It's de-lovely—”
As her guest book suggests, de Botton is not afraid to mix it up. This stylish En-glishwoman is a discriminating art collectsor in whose London town house works by Francis Bacon and Chris Ofili make unexpected wall mates, and giltwood furnishings of royal provenance, signed by the great eighteenth-century French makers, join the monolithic marble seats of sculptor Scott Burton. De Botton is also smart as a whip—she has a professional bridge team that plays at championship level. She met her match in the charismatic Gilbert de Botton, to whom she was married for ten years before his death in 2000. Born in Alexandria, that subtle, cosmopolitan and mysterious city, de Botton was a visionary financier who shared his wife's passion for art—he was the only man to have been painted by both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The house's library is a testament to his bounding erudition. “I spent hours up a ladder just looking at the titles,” says Haslam. “He had such an extraordinary breadth of knowledge.”
A decade ago, Gilbert de Botton discovered that the Burgundy château that had once been the home of Montaigne, the sixteenth-century essayist, was on the market. Seduced by the intellectual idea of re-creating a library worthy of its former resident, de Botton determined to acquire it. Janet, however, had no intention of spending her time in staid, inclement Burgundy, however storied the surroundings. Force of nature that she is, she prevailed, and the couple duly turned south in their search. The bastides of Provence are generally designed to withstand the rigors of the local climate; to keep their cool in the stupefying heat of summer and to withstand the tyranny of the mistral, the brutal wind that lashes the landscape at all times of the year. With protection in mind, the farmers plant barriers of trembling poplar trees to spare their crops, and cradle their houses with high walls that create shady courtyard refuges but obstruct the views. For a personality as outgoing as de Botton's, however, this claustrophobic effect was not what she had in mind for a holiday house, and one estate after another was duly dismissed. Eventually, however, the couple discovered a bull farm, its 1,000 acres rolling from the tough, rocky wilderness of Les Baux, dotted with Saracen towers, to the reedy wilds of the Camargue below. On the plateau that divided these two very different landscapes sat a vast granary barn. Here, at last, was a building with a generous view.
The de Bottons were short of neither vision nor funds, and they were to draw considerably on both in their transformation of this epic but untamed landscape into one of the great contemporary estates of our time. “All their brilliant creative energies went into making a uniquely beautiful place,” says Lord Jacob Rothschild, “certainly the most comfortable and thoughtful place I've ever stayed in my life.”
It was a daunting project, and the de Bottons' friend the great tastemaker Baroness Liliane de Rothschild suggested that they collaborate with the poetic decorator and landscape architect Jean-Louis Raynaud and his dynamic Connecticut-born partner Kenyon Kramer. Based in nearby Aix, where the two have an enchanting treasure-trove shop, the pair work for exigent maecenae from Provence to Malibu. “Etonne-moi! [“Amaze me!”] was the theme,” says Raynaud, laughing. “Janet is someone who loves to be amazed—but never surprised.” Raynaud was well qualified to fulfill the brief. As a young man just starting out, he tried to persuade various clients to buy the ravishing ruin of a Louis XVI hunting lodge, built for an archbishop of Avignon, that he had seen and loved in the Luberon region of southern France. When no one responded to its magic, Raynaud eventually took on the task himself, moving the entire structure, stone by numbered stone, to a wheat field in Provence 120 kilometers away, near his wife's family château. The carefully restored and re-created house was named La Pavillion de Victoire. Now, nearly 35 years later, the grounds are laid out with an abundance of matching pavilions, orangeries, and studios, and its fifteen acres of exquisite gardens are arranged with mathematical rigor and romantic flair. “It's been his life's work,” explains Kramer, “but it's also been our visiting card. Clients think, If he can do this, he can do anything.”
“We've got to find him,” de Botton told her husband. “Unless this man will do the house, I don't want it!” So the de Bottons set off for Aix, but having missed Raynaud at his shop, they eventually descended unannounced on the Pavillion. “He was rather shocked,” de Botton remembers, but she and her husband were suitably impressed. “I could never have done the house without them,” says de Botton now. “Kenyon is a genius at producing supercomfort without glitz. . . . Jean-Louis had lots of ideas that were fantastic, and however impossible an idea seemed at the outset, it was never a problem to do—I loved that.”
In his turn, Kramer declares, “I don't think I've ever worked with anyone where I laughed so much—it was a thoroughly pleasant, creative experience. But not always easy—Gilbert wanted everything clean, and Janet, being English, wanted it shabby.” Hearing that, de Botton laughs, adding, “Gilbert wanted Versailles, and I wanted the absolute opposite.” She simplified as she went, banishing passementerie from curtains and reducing maquettes for bookcases and closets to their elegant bones. “It's a very refined, subtle taste,” says Susan Gutfreund, a friend who followed the project from its inception. “When you walk from room to room there is a continual discovery, but at the same time nothing screams at you; everything is understated.”
De Botton started ambitiously and never stopped; even before planning permission for the transformation of that immense hay-filled barn was given, she had the towering jungle undergrowth in the field below cleared in order to create an elaborate box maze in the late-seventeenth-century manner. Inspiration came from the legend of the Minotaur—there is a bullring nearby, after all—and the result is a triumphant expression of man over nature. “When you walk through the house and come out on to the terrace and see that maze, it's one of the great sights of all time,” says Haslam.
The de Bottons' considerable combined resources made light of such generous gestures as the planting of an allée of more than 300 plane trees, which now leads majestically to an eighteenth-century Romanesque temple, or of a spreading grove of Gilbert de Botton's beloved ancient Spanish olive trees (many are 300 years old; one is approaching its millennium). Or the creation of a lake fringed by apple trees and Japanese maples. Or of a wondrous, rippling ocean of lavender bushes, a quarter of a kilometer long.
And the de Bottons had firm ideas about the house, too. “I didn't want an uptight house,” says de Botton. “I wanted light and spaciousness. And I want people to feel they can do what they want to do, more or less, and relax.” As a hostess, de Botton “doesn't marshal her guests,” notes Haslam. “Everything's got a lightheartedness to it.” For Raynaud, “The house resembles Janet, which is its great success; it is sophisticated but simple at the same time; it is not for show—it's intimate. It's a delicious place to live because the rooms are on a human scale.”
While the ideas for the barn were in development, the de Bottons lived in what had been a farm worker's cottage. Once “a little cement prefab,” as de Botton remembers, it was magically reimagined by Raynaud and Kramer as a prototype for the main house, and transformed into an enchanting stone-clad farmhouse.
Meanwhile, up at the big house, dreams were swiftly becoming reality. “Janet is impetuous,” concurs Raynaud. “She will go for it and, if it doesn't work, break it down and start again. We could only have created the house in such a short time with someone like that.” The proportions of the coolly inviting and discreetly splendid entrance hall, with its sweeping Louis XVI staircase, were arrived at, by de Botton's estimation, on the tenth attempt.
The farmer's sitting area and the hay loft above in the original barn became a double drawing room, furnished with a seventeenth-century stone fireplace found at Houdan in northern France, the site of a great annual auction of architectural objects; urns and balustrades, which help create the illusion of a seventeenth-century manse, were also swag from this sale. “I was buying nonstop for five years, all over the world,” says de Botton, who stormed the souks of Cairo and the antiquaires of the Pimlico Road, the Left Bank, and the Upper East Side in her quest for objects of charm and whimsy. “Every single thing I bought worked in that house,” she adds. “It was enormous fun, but now I'm shopped out!”
Gutfreund, who has recently parlayed her considerable taste into a successful professional decorating career, “had her eye in for the house,” as de Botton remembers. Gutfreund spotted some Louis XV provincial canvas wall panels at a Left Bank antiquaire, for instance, and kept the dealer open until the de Bottons could arrive for a viewing. The proportions and look of this set dictated the scale and charm of the dining room. Gutfreund also suggested a room inspired by one she had seen in Sweden, its walls lined with shelves of porcelain. This became the inspiration for Raynaud's perfectly enchanting breakfast room, its shelves now filled with rare eighteenth-century Marseilles faience that de Botton has assembled with her customary single-minded passion (“Believe me, it's easier to collects gold boxes,” she says, laughing). “It was so much more rewarding to collects them one by one,” says Gutfreund. “There were no quick fixes in that house—the sign of a great collectsor.”
In the balmy days of summer, however, guests generally take their meals alfresco, under the split-reed, vine-clad arbor on the terrace, with views to the landscape, both cultivated and wild. And languid days drift by at the Olympian pool, its delightful wooden “tent” pavilions (the setting for many a card game, coolly analytic or frenzied) devised by Haslam after the tole examples at Sweden's royal Drott-ningholm Castle.
In stark contrast to Raynaud's upholstered comfort is the wing created for Gilbert de Botton's office and sanctuary. John Pawson, an architect whose highly reductive aesthetic the couple had long admired, created this spatially complex area. It is akin to time travel to walk through the boiseried kitchens, their elements salvaged from ancient stone houses, the vast Victorian iron ovens stamped with the house's name, to arrive in this spaceship-cool environment.
De Botton wanted only architectural gardens to be seen from the house; she didn't want to see flowers. So when the couple acquired a two-hectare parcel of land far to one side of the property, she immediately sketched her plan for a potager. She had admired the work of Lady Mary Keen at Lord Jacob Rothschild's Buckinghamshire estate, Eythrope, and they collaborated on the project. What resulted is a fruit, vegetable, and cutting-flower English garden that defies the mistral and whose Edwardian magnificence and abundance is unlike anything created in the South of France for a century.
“Janet knew what she wanted,” says Keen. “I adored working for her because she was so interested and involved. She really is very cool, Janet; she's bien dans sa peau—absolutely easy with herself. We spent hours on that wonderful terrace poring over plant lists. I'd be exhausted after six hours, and she'd still be fresh as a daisy,” Keen adds. “People are usually very traditional in gardens; they don't want bright and brilliant. But Janet wanted full-time color and she likes shocking roses and dahlias and bold color, so it was great fun. She wanted a lot of completely impossible things, but being Janet she made some of those impossible things happen by sheer grit and determination.” And with the help of a battalion of gardeners. When the hydrangea walk was first planted seven years ago, for instance, the hundreds of bushes initially bloomed a fragile soft pink. De Botton was dismayed but unbowed. This summer, after years of a steadily unrelenting diet of acid drips, and protected from the rigors of the elements by shady split-rush canopies, they have finally burst forth in an eye-popping riot of the longed-for vivid ultramarine blue. “The point of the flower garden was to have things to cut for the house,” says Keen. The plantings were dictated by the house's decor. De Botton had seen a glazed mauve linen in Haslam's shop a decade earlier and always longed to use it; now it hangs simply at the drawing room's seven French windows and dictates the room's color scheme. In the spring, armfuls of glorious purple irises fill the room, while an embarrassment of cosmos daisies sets it off in the summer—all deftly arranged with insouciant drama by Kol, de Botton's noiselessly efficient Cambodian butler.
Although de Botton has made her house a haven of lassitude for her very lucky guests, the indefatigable hostess insists that she is not looking to relax. “That's not my thing at all. I would never have a massage or go to a spa—the idea sends me into the stratosphere of horrors! Although the house is a holiday place, there's always masses for me to occupy myself with.” And there are still more schemes afoot, including a plan for a shell grotto to be created by the master artist jeweler Joel Rosenthal, who discreetly dedicated the catalog of his magical November 2002 retrospective at London's Somerset House to de Botton, his “muse.” “It's a very happy house,” says de Botton. “I think that Gilbert saw it as their great creation,” adds Haslam. “It's got that legendary quality. It just is a sort of masterpiece, isn't it?”