Le Château des Alpilles

Le Château des Alpilles stands just beyond Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, reached through a long avenue of century-old plane trees and surrounded by seven hectares of parkland. The estate’s history extends across several centuries, but the house as we know it today took shape around 1825, when Pierre-Paul Blain, a Provençal merchant who had made his fortune in Philadelphia, built the imposing Maison de Maître beside the older Mas de Gaillard.

Through the Blain family and Amédée Pichot, the estate became associated with the literary and political world of 19th-century France, welcoming figures including Lamartine, Guizot and Thiers. Over time, however, the property declined, its buildings and gardens gradually losing their former splendour.

A new chapter began in 1979, when Jacques and Françoise Bon acquired the estate. Françoise saw the possibility of creating not simply a hotel, but a house in which travellers would be received personally, almost as friends. Her daughter Catherine later joined her, and together they restored and transformed the property while preserving the atmosphere and character that had drawn the family to it in the first place.

Today, that story continues with the next generation, Maya and Mathilde. The Château has become something increasingly rare: a place shaped over decades by the same family, and particularly by several generations of women, each inheriting not only a property but a responsibility for its continuity.

The estate now brings together the Maison de Maître, the former Mas de Gaillard, a chapel and historic outbuildings within a remarkable landscape of mature trees, gardens and open space. Yet its importance lies in more than architecture or setting. What distinguishes Le Château des Alpilles is its sense of permanence — the feeling of a living house whose identity has been protected, interpreted and passed from one generation to the next.