It was while house-hunting in the Provençal village of Vallabrègues that Benoît Rauzy and Anthony Watson first stumbled upon a perfectly preserved 18th-century hôtel particulier. “It was like a bridge to the past,” says Rauzy of the property, close to Avignon, that they’ve since restored and now call home. “You opened the door and fell into another time.” Though built in 1730, the house had previously been in the ownership of just two families. More exceptional still, among the original murals, fireplaces and paintings were clues to the village’s past – half-made baskets, rattan chairs and furniture sketches – all vestiges of its previous incarnation as a wicker workshop.
“There were lots of little signs,” says Rauzy, a Paris-born energy consultant, of the wicker relics scattered throughout the rooms that had been left unoccupied for 30 years. Watson, a stylist raised between Provence, Kent and Cameroon, has familial ties to the region, where his mother was raised. The pair already owned a smaller property in the village, but were looking to upsize. “The house had been totally unchanged since the last wicker craftsman left in the 1980s,” says Rauzy. “Before that time, the family who lived here had been one of the biggest wicker producers in the village.”
Vallabrègues has a reputation that belies its diminutive size. Set on the left bank of the river Rhône, its susceptibility to flooding has long made the land ripe for rattan, the raw material of a once-thriving wicker-making industry. At its 18th-century peak more than a quarter of the villagers were wicker workers. But production waned after the second world war and was eventually wiped out following the introduction of cheaper materials in the 1960s – until now.
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