HouseBoulbon (13)

Price :

$1,221,100

USD

Euro € EURAmerican Dollar ($ USD)British Pound (£ GBP)

Surface290 m²bedrooms4 bathrooms4 land183 m²

In Boulbon, at the foot of the castle, a 290-m² village house renovated in a contemporary style, its interior garden and patio with view. History’s twists of fate are such that the street on which the house is located is now one of the quietest in Boulbon, but at one time, it was the busiest. As the main village road during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was then lined with prosperous houses recognisable by their façades, certain of which had cross-windows and doors with sculpted pediments. Others, more austere, like this one here, never stood out with their excess of ornamental decoration and were the subject of so many consolidations after the Revolution and then in the 19th century that, today, there are only scattered fragments of their medieval origins, nothing more.
The house’s main façade therefore presents a single window on the ground floor and a door that identically mirrors the one that preceded it, but enlarged for people with reduced mobility. Three windows per floor protected by double-leaf solid wooden shutters complete a façade that, apart from its recent restoration, subtly blends into the landscape.
From the outside, there are no hints regarding the interior’s surprise.
A monumental religious statue watches over the street entrance, that of Saint Christophe, with his feet in water, who carries the Christ child on his shoulders across the neighbouring Rhône River.
Moreover, the toponym “Boulbon” is not originally Provencal, but Celtic, coming from the name of the Gallic divinity for thermal waters. Its heyday was reached in the 14th century, a time of great turbulence. Based on its spiral staircase, the house dates precisely from the end of the 14th century, in other words, the troubled period that started with the succession of Queen Joanna I of Naples whose fiefdom this was. Assassinated by her cousin Charles de Duras, the good Queen Joanna could no longer protect Lord Bérenger de Boulbon and the village ended up definitively falling to the seneschal de Beaucaire, an accomplice of his traitorous cousin. Only the name of the city and the castle remained.