Provence is the perfect place to live out whatever dreamy South of France cliché you have in your head. Photo / Getty Images
Life looks prettier, more vivid, more romantic in Provence - the perfect place to live out whatever dreamy South of France cliché you have in your head, writes Tim Roxborogh.
An old stone building that looked like the fairy-tale meeting point of ramshackle and luxury, surrounded by rows of olive trees, guarded by low-slung mountains in the distance. I’d checked out everything in the Provence region in the South of France from castles to chateaus to wineries to cute little B&Bs down narrow village streets. And nothing grabbed me quite like that olive farm.
Gordes – population 1780 – wasn’t even on my original South of France itinerary, owing to the small matter that I’d never heard of it. But I had, of course, heard of Avignon, just a 45-minute drive away to the west, and in researching places to stay in Provence, I’d stumbled upon Les Callis Olive Farm in Gordes. And with it, a rearranging of my plans.
I don’t even like olives. Olive oil, yes. Olive oil-based spread? Absolutely. Olives, not so much. But about two seconds on the Les Callis Olive Farm website was all it took for me to know this was somewhere I’d have to stay if I was going to Provence. And as luck would have it, I was.
There’s so much romance to Provence and as soon as you’re there, you understand why many of history’s greatest painters - think Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Monet and Picasso – were drawn to live and create there. Whether it’s the long shadows of ancient castle walls, the popping of the colours in outdoor markets, the way the wildflowers dance in the breeze, or even how the long grass sways; from the grand to the humble, life looks prettier, more vivid, more romantic in Provence.
For me, part of the romance is in the concept of staying somewhere long enough to find the rhythms of local life, even if it’s living out whatever dreamy South of France cliché you have in your head. If that cliché happens to be daily helmet-less bike rides down idyllic lanes to local markets to find baguettes and croissants, so be it. Gordes, and more specifically, Les Callis Olive Farm, hit as being both that cliché as well as being something a little different.
Les Callis began its life over a century ago as a coaching inn, or “post house”. These small hotels were as much for people as they were for horses and were once commonplace all over Europe, especially in the days before rail. And though the necessity of having a place to rest your horse for the night has gone, many of these structures remain, often as pubs. Or in the case of Les Callis, repurposed into a farm and family home with five beautiful suites for the public.
The Roche family were high-fliers in Paris in search of a quieter life in Provence. Alexandra had 20 years of running her own PR agency, while her husband Nicolas was – and still is – an osteopath and acupuncturist. Then 15 years ago they spotted the rundown old coaching inn for sale that would one day become Les Callis, and in an instant had the vision of how they’d convert it into a B&B and olive farm. In 2016 that dream became a reality with the planting of 240 olive trees and the full refurbishment of the original two-storey, V-shaped building.
Along the way, they added an infinity pool and a petanque court, furnishing the home with the kind of expensive, understated chic touches that come so naturally to expensive, understated chic French people. Our young host Martin, the 20-something son of Alexandra and Nicolas, gave me the honest answer I wanted when I asked him if I could pass as being French. “No”, he said, “it’s your haircut and your shoes that are the giveaway”.
Martin, for the record, was always dapper, even if he was just wearing shorts and a T-shirt and slippers. It must’ve been the haircut. And the slippers. He was a dab hand at petanque too, which we played in the golden hour sun, looking back at the rough perfection of the stone house with its flowers, crawling plants and internal courtyard like something straight out of a painting by one of those icons.
I stayed at Les Callis long enough to get into those romantic South of France rhythms, which for me involved recategorising pain-au-chocolat as a breakfast staple of borderline health-food proportions. It also involved daily walks into the village to a lookout point that still drops my jaw thinking about it now. Gordes is perched on a hillside and filled with a network of secret caves and tunnels beneath its laneways. Viewing the village from that lookout, it’s hard to tell what is cliffside and what is building, which makes it all the more mesmerising. Many people regard Gordes as the most photogenic village in all France.
It has some rivals though, including nearby Roussillon (population 1300). The buildings of Gordes are white and grey and made of limestone, but Roussillon is all about the rich reds and oranges that hail from the enormous ochre mines surrounding it. Only 10 kilometres east of Gordes, Roussillon is similarly splashed on to a hill. I visited to cover part of what’s known as the Ochre Trail, where the scenery abruptly shifts from all those locked-in ideas people have of the South of France to resemble something like the Australian Outback.
I’d parked up outside a tourist shop selling every lavender-related product known to mankind: lavender soaps, lavender oils, lavender creams, lavender perfumes, lavender cookbooks, lavender postcards, lavender fridge magnets, lavender drink bottles and, handily for me as a father of a 3-year-old daughter, lavender dolls. Choosing a friendly doll that looked like a purple Cabbage Patch kid, I took a handful of steps around a corner and discovered I was on a ridgeline with a sharp drop-off. There was another lookout point, but instead of a view back to Roussillon’s main village, I beheld towering bright layers of jagged sediment.
The ochre that lies all around Roussillon forms so much of the village’s identity that there are strict council regulations about what you can build, what it will be made from and how it will look. This has preserved the unique feel of the village, almost as famous for its WWII history (the Irish literary giant Samuel Beckett spent years here evading the Nazis while helping the French Resistance) as it is for its colour.
Speaking of which, Roussillon might be all reds and oranges, but that lavender shop wasn’t an outlier. Provence and lavender go hand in hand, so much so that tourism boards are trying – perhaps in vain – to encourage overseas visitors to come outside peak lavender season of July and August. Places like the 12th Century Senanque Abbey (5km north of Gordes, 16km west of Roussillon) draw busload upon busload of tourists every year trying to replicate the photos on the postcards I’d seen at the lavender shop.
Which is to say, a stunning limestone abbey almost a thousand years old, set in a tight valley, drowning in rows of shocking purple lavender. And tourists, heaps of tourists. If you can tolerate a stunning limestone abbey almost a thousand years sold set in a tight valley, but with no flowering lavender, then like me, you’ll get the place largely to yourself. There’s something to be said for not being in the South of France in summer.
With more than 300 days of sunshine a year, this is a part of the world where the shoulder seasons are liable to be just as brilliantly blue-skied as summer, only not as sweltering. Nor as purple. And though I might not have dined out on the olives back at Les Callis, I can report the oil they produce is so good that they have a sommelier who does tastings.
“I eat a margarine made from olive oil in New Zealand – is that a very French thing to do?” I was putting culturally-themed questions to Martin again. “No, that is not something that we do here. French people do not do this”. I may have fallen for the romance of the South of France, but I wasn’t fooling anyone into thinking I was a local.
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