Photo: Les Maisons CAB.
A house that was dismantled in Alsace, restored in Nancy and raised again among olives and pines, where the hill town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence sits above the roofline.
Jean Prouvé drew this house in 1958 with his son Claude, the first time the two worked together. It was built for a notary at Epfig, in Alsace, and was due for demolition when the collector Hubert Bonnet bought it in December 2021, according to Wallpaper*. It was taken apart through 2022, restored in Nancy, and rebuilt in the grounds of Le Clos du Père François. That a house can make this journey is the point of the design: Prouvé built in panels and a steel frame, and the structure shows rather than hides.
Prouvé’s postwar demountables were meant for emergencies. Wallpaper* reports that a 1944 order for 800 six-by-six-metre houses came from the reconstruction ministry, designed so three people could raise one in a day, and that around 400 were made. This one came later and gentler, drawn for a client rather than a crisis. The hotel says it is listed as Architecture Contemporaine Remarquable.
Inside it is 115 square metres with two bedrooms, one bathroom and a kitchen opening onto the garden, with an 11 by 5 metre pool in the grounds. Metal and glass frame the view; wood and stone warm the rooms. The furniture is by Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, and Wallpaper* says none of it is roped off. Bonnet has stayed in every house he has made, if only for two nights.
The catch is how it is let. The Prouvé house cannot be rented alone: the hotel lists it “only with the Clos du Père François”, the nineteenth-century farmhouse next door, which adds five bedrooms and brings the combined capacity to 14. The Prouvé itself sleeps four. Online booking requires a minimum stay, and the site publishes no rates, so you must enquire. Wallpaper* puts the village twenty minutes up the hill on foot.
The house is one of about a dozen Les Maisons CAB lets, from Knokke to Panarea. If a night in a Prouvé was ever a museum visit you were not allowed to touch, this one lets you make breakfast.