A low house of aluminium panels and folded steel stands among the olives and pines below Saint-Paul-de-Vence, its long window turned to the ramparts above. The hill town is in view from every room; Chagall is buried up there, and at La Colombe d’Or they still hang the pictures its painters handed over in place of the bill. Jean Prouvé drew the house in 1958, with his son Claude, for a notary at Epfig, in the Alsace vineyards, 700km north.
Tour Maison Prouvé 58
Maison Prouvé 58 came south by a route that would have pleased its maker. Hubert Bonnet bought the house in December 2021, by then due for demolition at Epfig, had it dismantled through 2022 and the parts sent to Nancy for restoration, with the Prouvé historian Catherine Coley consulted on the rescue before it was raised again on the grass here. Two bedrooms in 115 square metres, a kitchen opening onto the lawn, the metal shell lined in wood and stone. A Prouvé desk and daybed, Charlotte Perriand’s Nuage shelving, cabinets by Le Corbusier, pieces by George Nakashima, none of it roped off. ‘In Prouvé’s work, the structure never hides,’ says Bonnet. ‘It becomes the very language of the object or the architecture.’
Trained at a forge in Nancy, Prouvé worked from the proposition that a building is a sum of parts that can be improved one joint at a time, which was tested in the worst conditions imaginable. After the bombing of Lorraine, Raoul Dautry, de Gaulle’s minister of reconstruction, ordered 800 demountable houses of six metres by six, the answer being a frame with panels that three people could raise in a day. Some 400 left the workshops, most broken up once permanent housing caught up. The survivors became collectable for the very quality that had made them useful, coming apart as readily as they went up. By Design Miami/Basel in 2007, Galerie Patrick Seguin had a Prouvé desk at €200,000, one of the 1944 houses, built for the homeless, at €280,000. The house at Saint-Paul came later, from a gentler need, drawn for a client instead of an emergency, one of five that CAB counts between 1958 and 1961, two of them now gone.
Bonnet bought his first Donald Judd in 1990 and has collected minimal and conceptual art ever since, with the dealer François Laffanour turning him towards the furniture. The houses came afterwards, as somewhere to put it all, a dozen of them now under the name Les Maisons CAB. At Knokke, on the Belgian coast, Le Paquebot is a 1936 villa by the modernist Louis-Herman De Koninck, furnished with Aalto beneath a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. Above Lake Geneva, Les Ailes is a 1930s house with Perriand chairs, a living room reworked by India Mahdavi. There is a chalet at Verbier, a house on Panarea, another inside the walls at Essaouira, a fourth on the Dominican coast at Las Terrenas in white polished concrete by Marc Corbiau, its Nordic furniture gone pale in the sun and salt, and an apartment on rue Jacob in Saint-Germain. The art is hung for guests, who have it to themselves; Bonnet would rather the houses were lived in than looked after.
The mass behind the Prouvé has not been restored as a period piece, the job having gone to an architect who goes unnamed, working to Bonnet’s own eye. Beams overhead, terracotta underfoot, vaulted ground-floor rooms open onto the garden; against the stone hang works by Viallat, Saytour, Dolla and Dezeuze, the Supports/Surfaces painters who took their canvases off the stretcher around Nice in the late 1960s. Outside, 3,881 square metres of grounds, a 1980s pool whose long wall carries a Claudia Comte mural. Seven bedrooms across the property make a celebration of almost any size possible; artists have been at work and at play on this hillside for a century, and the Prouvé is an invitation to keep the party going.
The village is twenty minutes up the hill on foot, while Fondation CAB lies eight minutes away by car, with a restaurant, a sculpture garden and galleries given over to residencies through the winter; Fondation Maeght and its Giacomettis are a little further on. Places like those, or a dealer’s, are usually where a Prouvé house ends up. The few turned into somewhere to stay include one at Château La Coste, the art and architecture estate near Aix, and now this one.
Bonnet’s reasons for letting them are practical enough: the foundation has to be paid for, the collection otherwise sitting in storage instead of alive on the walls of a house where somebody is having breakfast. He finds hotels clinical, checking you in at three and out at eleven at triple the price of a decade ago, preferring that people have the run of a place, at their own pace. The luxury is time, and the pieces you spend it among. ‘I find that normal, to share design, art,’ he says. ‘Life is short. I have to make the best of it.’
Bonnet is not much good at stopping; by his own account, he is the quickest visitor in any museum, and he has stayed in every house he has made, if only for two nights. He has slept often in the 6x6 that stands in the foundation’s garden, a small thing beside this one, the first Prouvé he could imagine properly living in, and means to take at least a week here with a few books and the phone switched off. ‘I love to be stuck,’ he laughs. ‘Once you are stuck, there is no way around it. You start to think differently.’
Maison Prouvé 58 and Le Clos du Père François are let together through Les Maisons CAB, rates on request. ‘Jean Prouvé, inventeur de maisons’, organised with Laffanour Galerie Downtown, runs at Fondation CAB, Saint-Paul-de-Vence. lesmaisonscab.com; fondationcab.com