ApartmentTarascon (13)

An enchanting 400m² apartment with a garden, court and patio in a 16th-century town mansion listed as a historical monument in southern France's Camargue region. The majestic fortified mansion was listed as a historical monument in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War. It has a ground floor, a first floor and a second floor. It was built in around 1530 during the first French Renaissance and it bears the main traits of this period.
The edifice stands where several paths of history meet. This crossroads is both literal and figurative.
It lies just south of the town’s royal collegiate church and the fortified chateau of René of Anjou. The house was the jewel in the crown of the medieval town’s aristocratic district, which showcased sumptuous princely homes up to the Second World War when the Allied bombings, carried out to liberate France, razed these gems to the ground.
Among the ruins, this mansion was the only survivor from the district’s past splendour. In the 1950s, the charming home had to start sharing the company of soulless concrete blocks of accommodation born of the frenzied drive to rebuild liberated France and urgently rehouse its people based on a post-war Corbusian model of architecture.

So the edifice is now at a junction between two worlds, where the Middle Ages and contemporary design collide, between two pivotal chapters in France’s long story. The building illustrates this poignantly: it seems to be turning its back on the royal chateau to face the modern housing nearby.
It is guarded by tall walls that it inherited from its initial propose as a fortified house. These walls separated it from the nearby royal chateau and protected it from any devastating flooding from the River Rhône. Its old facade looks south at a range of 1950s brutalist buildings. To tone down this sharp contrast between historical architecture and modern structures, the local authorities added vegetation to the large paved square in front of the mansion, planting a cypress and olive trees here. Before then, this square was in a state of decline. Now it is a no-parking area. From this pleasant square, the property’s large entrance gate leads into the main courtyard of this Italian-style palace.