luxury farmhouse for sale Ribaute-les-Tavernes, France

A Tuscan-style farmhouse with 51 hectares of grounds on a hill between the Cévennes mountains and the scrubland of France's Gard department. At the end of a tarmac road, you see the southern side on the farmhouse on a hill, which was probably once a Roman oppidum. One of its towers rises at the corner of the edifice; the other stands symmetrically to it, behind a cluster of trees. The site used to be an agricultural building. Its north wing was the first section to be built. Restoration works that were completed in 1714 transformed it, giving it its Florentine style of today. Later, it was a refuge for Camisards – Huguenot rebels in the Cévennes region; a prison for Italian soldiers; and a place of resistance and conflict – bullet holes and wall inscriptions attest to this. Today, it looks out over the surrounding countryside and the property’s grounds: an unbroken expanse of 51 hectares made up of olive groves, meadows and scrubland. The building complex encloses a courtyard. A passage for horses cuts through its south wing, forming a carriage entrance. The outer walls are rendered with old lime coating beneath which a bond of rounded limestone rocks can be seen. The property’s southern face is flanked with two corner towers. Windows in line with each other punctuate its facade, either side of its basket-handle archway that looks out over a swimming pool and pool house. On the first floor, four tall, narrow windows are spaced out more evenly and symmetrically, with bull’s eye windows beneath the eaves. The towers’ front and side walls are punctuated with a window on each floor. These windows are identically sized. The carriage-entrance gate is painted red, as are the window shutters, on the edifice’s south side and its other faces too. The north and west wings are now hidden behind two metal barns – tokens of the property’s recent agricultural activity. The eastern face looks out across an endless view that stretches all the way to the Alps. The different building sections are crowned with hipped or gable roofs adorned with barrel tiles and underlined with double-row génoise cornices. They house two apartments, an oratory and annexes formerly used for agriculture, silkworm farming and business.

A 17th century farmhouse in the heart of the Gard Garrigues, a precious testimony to centuries of pastoral life. The various buildings, with their thick limestone walls, are part of a series of edifices that were erected starting in the 17th century. They surround a courtyard, a space which links and protects the different farm activities. Called a 'barn' in the 18th century, this agricultural building consisted of a single structure to the north and an elevation at right angles to the east. Today, only four massive stone pillars remain, distributed around the courtyard. The development of the other two wings still standing today had to wait until the 19th century, when the cultivation of mulberry trees - of which fine specimens remain in the park - developed. At that time, silkworm breeding was at its peak, until a devastating epidemic, pepper disease, ravaged most of the farms in the Gard. The architectural style of the eastern wing presents all the typical characteristics of a silkworm farm: a long, narrow and tall building, two storeys high, with small regular openings and a gable roof, with a chimney for the ventilation and heating necessary for the growth of the 'Magnans” (greedy silkworms). The second wing on the western side was built for the staff who were required to live on the premises. The windows, which are larger in size, receive generous sunlight from the west. From the windows facing the sunset, the view encompasses the surrounding garrigue shrublands as well as the flock of sheep from the neighbouring village that regularly graze nearby. To the north, the building has remained in its original state with, on the lower level, solid cross vaults which sheltered the animals under the hayloft above. The courtyard facades are entirely lime-rendered and those visible from the outside - with the exception of the east wing - show bonded rubble limestone. The gable roofs are clad with monk-and-nun tiles.