Join this writer’s retreat run by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham
La Gonette, the former holiday home of late British interior designer Robert Kime, has been reborn by an Australian author and American novelist.
I’ll venture most of us can count on one hand the travel experiences we’ve had that have exceeded our expectations. Instagram sells us carefully framed images of picturesque destinations and life-enhancing moments. But they rarely measure up.
In June, however, I spent a week in a real-life reverie in Provence on a six-day reading and writing retreat hosted by Australian author Alice Nelson and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Michael Cunningham. Along with 10 other guests – a generation-spanning assortment of Anglo-Saxons (and one Italian) who travelled from all corners of the globe for reading, respite and much-needed inspiration – we were welcomed to Nelson’s home, La Gonette, in the department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
As with the very best narrative arcs, the story of how Nelson came to own La Gonette, which she purchased from British interior designer and textiles aficionado Robert Kime, has a whiff of something fated. After spending much of the pandemic lockdowns in Perth in 2022, she and her Australian husband moved full-time to their holiday home in the Luberon village of Bonnieux. It was then that she connected with Kime to buy some antique textiles.
He told her about his own holiday retreat nearby, La Gonette, a 17th-century manor house built from local stone and located close to the small hillside village of Simiane-la-Rotonde. It had been a happy place for he and his wife, children’s author Helen Nicholl, who died in 2012. Such was the depth of his loss, Kime had rarely visited since, all but abandoning La Gonette to the passage of time. He called the house a “sleeping beauty” and, as it was spring, he was worried about the garden, which had been left to run wild, and sad that no one was there to witness the annual bloom of the irises he had planted with Nicholl. He asked Nelson to go and check on them.
“The house had fallen into disrepair. It was Miss Havisham-like, with layers of dust, and the garden had gone completely wild; there were brambles covering the gates, and you couldn’t even get through some parts of it. It was spring, and the irises were out and the roses were coming,” Nelson recalls of her first impressions. “I just remember stepping into that entrance hall; it was like stepping into another universe. I was completely bewitched by the beauty. It felt like it was just sitting there waiting. Board games were still on the shelves and books were in the bookshelves. I wanted to be the one to bring it back to life.”
Ultimately that was Kime’s intention, too. He felt a connection with Nelson, an author like his wife, who had so enjoyed writing at La Gonette, and gave her the option to buy it, with many of the original furnishings.
“I think he loved the idea that I wanted it to be a place for writing primarily for myself, but then beyond that a connection with the local community and the wider community, too,” Nelson says of what is now the permanent home of the writer and her husband, their young son, and (thus far) three rescue dogs. The couple possess a rare kind of generosity, adopting an open-door policy for all types, from overseas visitors to curious locals and four-legged friends.
La Gonette is now very much alive again; breathtakingly so. The irises in the garden are flourishing, the climbing roses free-roaming and tangled, and Nelson has retained its unkept lushness. “I always tell the gardeners that we have to keep the garden sauvage [untamed]. They think I am mad,” she says.
Nelson has made this home her own, while staying true to Kime’s approach to collected design – an artful arrangement of objects from distinctly different eras and places that come together in conversation, to which she has added local antique finds and a legion of books. It is a place of great beauty, but comfort, too, furnished with numerous sofas that beckon at siesta hour when the heat becomes too much. There’s a long terrace on which we curl up in cane armchairs and read or dine on its long table as the sun sets.
One side of the home features a grand façade, but the back, which resembles a farmhouse, serves as the main entrance. One door takes you into an entrance hall, with its grand cantilevered staircase that winds up to the five spacious bedrooms above. Mostly, however, we tend to enter through the kitchen, which is always abuzz with activity and fragrant with mouthwatering smells.
“La Gonette is enchanted, which is not a word I use often, or lightly. Everybody who comes here feels it; no one seems quite able to describe it,” Cunningham says of the home where he has stayed for several weeks during each of the past few summers.
The rhythm of daily life at La Gonette is structured around our morning workshops with Cunningham, which take place at a monolithic stone table in the light-flooded orangerie, beautifully overgrown with star jasmine.
Nelson met Cunningham at a Ulysses online reading group during lockdown, and the two struck up a friendship. “It was also the beginning of this notion of how wonderful it was to bring readers together to talk about literature and books and the things that come from that,” she says.
Certainly, that is what the week delivers. We are assigned three readings per day, loosely following the course Cunningham teaches at Yale University, called The Craft of Fiction. As the cusp of the northern summer presented a barrage of headlines that had us reeling daily, it was a privilege to give myself the time to disconnect, to read – incredible stories, such as Terrific Mother by Lorrie Moore and In the Gloaming by Alice Eliot Dark — and then dissect our thoughts and experience with other lively readers and writers.
Outside of workshops, there are optional activities including wild swimming, lunch at a nearby monastery and a picnic in an olive grove. This landscape retains its untouched character and agricultural roots, occupied by a patchwork of small farms and small-scale producers. Its quality of light is precisely the kind of backdrop that the Post-Impressionists sought to immortalise on canvas.
Throughout the week, our group connects in unforgettable ways: in the shared experiences of our very small but present lives and over delicious meals cooked by chefs Harriet Davidson and Jeni Glasgow. “People left saying that they would take that renewed sense of hope, of shared humanity, and of being newly in love with the world in a way that made them committed to saving it,” says Nelson after we leave.
If that sounds enticing, Cunningham will return in the northern summer of 2026 to lead another group of lucky readers. “Future guests are guaranteed a stimulating, lively week devoted to reading and writing, and the opportunity to get to know others who care deeply about reading and writing, which, for many of us, can be an isolated and isolating experience. Here, for that week, no one is alone,” Cunningham says. Additionally, Nelson has expanded the annual program to include retreats with Australian interior stylist Megan Morton, reading sojourns with Readings Australia and, potentially, cooking workshops.
In the calm, Nelson will be working on her fifth novel, inspired by her life in this place, which seems to exist outside of time and reality. “I’m trying to gather some parts of my experiences here and put them into fiction, which is very challenging because people often say to me, ‘You couldn’t put this in a novel – no one would believe it’,” she says.
This story is from the August issue of WISH.
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