luxury farmhouse for sale Montpellier, 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.

A seventeenth-century bastide farmhouse to be restored in 2 2 hectares that include a villa, a belvedere tower and outhouses in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France. The property covers 2.2 hectares and faces the Alpilles mountain range. You can walk to the town centre of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence from the property. Its collection of buildings was once used for agriculture. These structures date back to different periods. Some are joined to each other. Others stand separately, grouped together around a vast patio. Most of the buildings are crowned with a gable roof of Roman tiling. The property was once a place of recreational activities. Lohan de Laurency, a squire of Avignon, bought the property not long before 1650. Later, in 1670, he sold it to a count: the Comte de La Ravine d’Arles, who built most of the farmhouse and was the property’s most persevering occupant. You reach the property via two different tracks lined with plane trees. These tracks frame the grounds and link them to the nearby secondary road on both sides, marking two distinct sections of the property: one on the north side, the other on the south side. The villa is made of stone from a local quarry in Fontvieille. Its square belvedere tower rises up from it proudly, looking out at the Alpilles mountains. This villa was built in 1875, reflecting a taste for Roman architecture. You can see it from the road. Among the property’s buildings, the villa is its centrepiece. It extends the original seventeenth-century farmhouse and links it to outhouses: a hay barn and a huge stone-and-brick warehouse that was also built in 1875, in a more industrial style. To the south, on the other side of the patio, a barn, a drying room, a garage for three cars, and accommodation lie opposite the warehouse. In the south section of the grounds, there is a nineteenth-century greenhouse with a glazed roof and a hinged metal frame. It has been masterfully restored and stands beside a vegetable patch. In front of the villa, a terrace leads to a cross-shaped garden that was once edged with box shrubs. A round ornamental pond lies in the middle of it, embellished with an arrangement of rocks. Concealed there is a water feature that makes the pond frothy when supplied with water. A network of private tracks snakes through the grounds and encloses these 2.2 hectares.

An old farm and its verdant surroundings on the Mont-Lozère plateau crossed by countless rivers. Formerly part of a priory dating back to the 14th century, the farm has preserved several original stone features. During the Wars of Religion from the 16th to the 18th century, this major resistance site welcomed many Huguenots in the strongly Protestant region. They found refuge on these heights to organise their defence, their worship or their escape without denying their faith, before the great and often definitive departure for Geneva. At the beginning of the 20th century, the last thatched roofs in the region disappeared, as a result of various fires or the abandonment of the countryside in favour of the city and its more modern comforts. A few ruins remain in the vicinity and bear witness to a past that is only waiting to rise from its ashes. Some of these remnants were rebuilt in the 1960s and roofed with slate tiles by people who were passionate about rural architecture and by the Cévennes National Park, which developed the lodgings as gîtes (guest houses). The property is one of three seasonally used houses in a small hamlet that are still standing, well apart from each other. Owing to its remoteness and its official protection as a national park, the area has been preserved, as its inhabitants were not encouraged to give in to modern materials that did not form part of the local culture. Not only the character and type of the buildings have been protected, but also the landscape, which has been given sustained attention so that no visual disturbance affects the well-being of the inhabitants, who still live in harmony with their environment. A few flocks of sheep and cattle are a reminder of the building's farming origins, but they are kept well away by a stream and a small footpath, themselves hidden by a hedge. On the other side of the property, a river, at once watercourse and private natural pool, forms several small waterfalls and leisurely water features, where one can relax without attracting attention, in winter as in summer.