Le 70 de Maisons Clotilde

A Painter’s Atelier Turned Designer Apartment Rental in Provence

With its Mediterranean alcove flair, this cozy, cave-like apartment with its original Provençal floor tiles and smoothly plastered curving surfaces is set in a small traditional village in Provence near a picturesque pond perfecting for picnicking and lazing around the shore.

A former agricultural outpost that became a painter’s studio in the 1940s, the ivy-draped, stone studio has been reimagined as an intimate apartment rental by an interior decorator and antiques dealer. She added a coat of matte plaster to its softly curving walls and built in its plastered and tiled kitchenette and bar, now supplied with local honey, olive oil and tisanes. One part Mediterranean troglodyte home, one part Provençal love nest, this is a getaway designed for disconnecting and living the slow, gentle life.

To explore the other homes in this collection, click on the following links: Le 4 de Maisons Cotilde, Le 40 de Maisons Cotilde.

Around

A pretty village of the southern Luberon region, Cucuron benefits from some 300 sunny days a year and is an authentic base for discovering deep Provence. Enjoy life’s simplest pleasures—sketching, wandering, reading, dreaming and marketing each Tuesday morning alongside the pond. The small, pastel-lined streets offer crumbling fountains and wishing wells, canopies of 200-year-old, knobby-trunked plane trees reflecting in the central plaza basin, and a handful of restaurants and cafes that surround it, along with a bakery and cheese shop, a candlemaker, and other small artisanal offerings. Like typical medieval villages, Cucuron rises towards its sentinel castle on a hilltop, though only the castle's dungeon remains. It’s a great walkable village, and from its highest points, you can take in Cezanne’s beloved Mont St. Victoire, the distant Alpilles, and acres of fertile farmland where cherries, grapes and olives are cultivated. The Michelin-starred La Petite Maison restaurant made famous in Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence is one of Cucuron’s most notable tables.

There are similarly picturesque villages to explore nearby, and the landscape is cinematic, an idyll of olive, lavender and grapevine covered foothills at the base of the Luberon mountain range. Nearby must-sees include Lourmarin, known as the little St. Tropez of the Luberon, Ansouis with its magnificent castle, and the well-heeled small city of Aix-en-Provence, which is about a 45-minute drive away and offers dozens of pretty market squares, stunning architecture, and a more aristocratic, literary bent than other Provençal cities.

Hikers love the region for its many walking paths and trails linking small villages. Many wander through orchards, farms, empty villages and beautiful, manicured Mas estates, and more strenuous trails take hikers into the surrounding Luberon Natural Park, deeper into woods and valleys cut through by gorges and caves, that also offer wide open vistas revealing the area’s unspoiled wild beauty.

Location

Nearest airport: Marseille (45 minutes to an hour)

Best time to visit

Spring through late fall