Restored 1958 Prouvé house now takes guests below Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Hubert Bonnet bought a 1958 Jean Prouvé house in December 2021 from a notary's estate at Epfig, Alsace. Workers spent 2022 dismantling the aluminium-and-steel structure and shipping the parts 700 kilometres south to Nancy for restoration. The villa, now called Maison Prouvé 58, sits reassembled on a Provençal mas (a traditional Provençal farmhouse) below Saint-Paul-de-Vence and takes paying guests through Les Maisons CAB.

Prouvé drew the house with his son Claude in 1958, originally for a notary in the Alsace vineyards. The southbound route would have pleased its maker: a building is a sum of parts you can improve one joint at a time. Bonnet had the structure dismantled through 2022, with Prouvé historian Catherine Coley advising on the rescue.

How big is the Prouvé house?

The villa covers 115 square metres across two bedrooms. A kitchen opens onto the lawn. The metal shell sits lined in wood and stone. Furniture stays loose and unroped: a Prouvé desk and daybed, Charlotte Perriand's Nuage shelving (1952 modular storage units shaped like clouds), cabinets by Le Corbusier, pieces by George Nakashima.

Why does Prouvé matter?

Jean Prouvé trained at a forge in Nancy. He worked from one proposition: a building is a sum of parts you can improve one joint at a time. After the 1944 bombing of Lorraine, Raoul Dautry, de Gaulle's minister of reconstruction, ordered 800 demountable houses, six metres by six, that three workers could raise in a single day. About 400 left the workshops, most broken up once permanent housing caught up.

The survivors became collectable for the very quality that had made them useful, coming apart as readily as they went up. By Design Miami/Basel in 2007, Galerie Patrick Seguin had a Prouvé desk at €200,000 and a 1944 house, built for the homeless, at €280,000. The 1958 house came from gentler origins: drawn for a client, not an emergency. CAB counts five between 1958 and 1961. Two are now gone.

Who is the collector?

Bonnet bought his first Donald Judd in 1990 and has collected minimal and conceptual art ever since. Dealer François Laffanour turned him toward the furniture; the houses came later, as somewhere to put it all. Since 1990, Les Maisons CAB has grown to about a dozen properties, and the rental portfolio spans:

• Le Paquebot, a 1936 villa by Louis-Herman De Koninck, in Knokke on the Belgian coast
• Les Ailes, a 1930s house above Lake Geneva with a living room reworked by India Mahdavi
• A chalet at Verbier
• A house on Panarea
• A house inside the walls at Essaouira
• Las Terrenas, white polished concrete by Marc Corbiau on the Dominican coast
• An apartment on rue Jacob in Saint-Germain

What's around the Prouvé?

The mas behind the Prouvé was not restored as a period piece. Beams run overhead, terracotta lies underfoot, vaulted rooms open onto the garden. Works by the Supports/Surfaces painters — Viallat, Saytour, Dolla, Dezeuze — hang against the stone, artists who took their canvases off the stretcher around Nice in the late 1960s. Outside sit 3,881 square metres of grounds and a 1980s pool whose long wall carries a Claudia Comte mural.

Seven bedrooms across the property handle celebrations of almost any size. Artists have worked and played on this hillside for a century, and the Prouvé is an invitation to keep the party going. Fondation Maeght and its Giacomettis lie a little further on.

What does this change for travellers?

Until now, only one Prouvé house had been turned into a stay: at Château La Coste, the art and architecture estate near Aix. Maison Prouvé 58 adds the second, on the Côte d'Azur rather than inland Provence.

"In Prouvé's work, the structure never hides," says Bonnet. "It becomes the very language of the object or the architecture."

Bonnet finds hotels clinical: three o'clock check-ins, eleven o'clock check-outs, triple the price of a decade ago. He prefers guests have the run of a place at their own pace.

"I find that normal, to share design, art," Bonnet says. "Life is short. I have to make the best of it."

Rates are on request. The property lets as Maison Prouvé 58 plus Le Clos du Père François. Bonnet plans to spend at least a week there himself with a few books and the phone switched off. "I love to be stuck," he says. "Once you are stuck, there is no way around it. You start to think differently."

"Jean Prouvé, inventeur de maisons," organised with Laffanour Galerie Downtown, runs at Fondation CAB through the winter residency season.