Stay at Ridley Scott’s estate in Provence
When the filmmaker bought an estate in Provence – complete with a vineyard – he sought a luminous escape for his family. Now you can stay there, too.
It wasn’t wine that led Ridley Scott and his family to Provence, although he enjoys a fine bottle of French red. Nor was it the proximity of good friends such as the late author Peter Mayle, who wrote the story for Scott’s 2006 film, A Good Year, from his home nearby. Nor was it the allure of Europe’s biggest antique markets, although the English film director admits he has become slightly addicted to browsing brocantes at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. It was, in fact, sunshine. “I used to live in the Cotswolds and adored it,” he says. “I had a manor house with 30 acres, a farm with horses and sheep, the whole nine yards, but the one thing that got me down was the constant drizzle and rain.”
Having had an advertising agency in Paris, he already appreciated “the French love of life, their culture”. So he started to look for a second home. At first, he tried the north. It was, though, “overdeveloped. And I found a lot of the architecture a bit formal and bourgeois.” Then in 1992, he got a call while at the Cannes Film Festival from an estate agent to say he might have found The One. “So I drove up at lunchtime and by 5 o’clock, I’d bought it,” says Scott. “It’s big; not a château. It’s a nice manoir, with a small vineyard.”
More than 30 years later, Mas des Infermières, close to the ancient citadel of Oppède-le-Vieux and the villages of Lacoste, Ménerbes and Bonnieux, has become a respected vineyard. When he bought it, he admits he wasn’t interested in wine and handed the operation of the vineyard to a local vintner. But in 2019, having realised “we had a really, really good terroir”, he took it back, redesigned the cellar, constructed a tasting room filled with souvenirs from his film life and opened a shop stocked with bottles of the estate’s olive oil and award-winning wine, with labels he had sketched himself.
It was only when family and visitors started to flock to his domaine agricole that he realised he needed somewhere for them to stay. With the help of the designers Pia Maclean and Chester Jones, who have worked on five of his houses since the ’70s, he started to buy up neighbouring properties and redesign them. The renovations have been pretty full-on, he says. With two films on his plate – 2023’s Napoleon and the forthcoming Gladiator II – the extra stress “was a bit of a nightmare, but I wanted it to be a family thing, to engage with the family and get them involved”.
To date, he has remade three guest cottages on his expanded 33-hectare estate: the five-bedroom Les Chênes Verts, the three-bedroom Mas Gris and the three-bedroom Mas Marcou. While buying the houses wasn’t expensive, he says, doing them up was. “It’s once you get inside that you have to watch the wallet.” Because none of the houses was architecturally special, he was able to rip out walls to create big open-plan spaces and transform tiny bedrooms into airy suites. Having studied at the Royal College of Art in London, reconfiguring spaces was easy for him, he says. “Because I am a dyed-in-the-wool designer, more than I am a director, I can’t help noticing things. I can visualise what it’s going to be. I am blessed with an eye that can see.”
The bones of the buildings were easy to rework, using local wood and stone from a nearby quarry. To bring in more light, he installed bifold doors and new windows. He brought furnishings from previous homes – in London, which he left in 2012, as well as his second home in Los Angeles, a 1922 Spanish-style mansion filled with Moroccan pieces – so many he had to build an extension. “Because I was filming Gladiator at the time [in Morocco], I was steeped in all things Moroccan, so it’s full of patterns and colour.”
Scott has imported some of the pieces into his French cottages, including a chest of drawers inlaid with bone and a finely carved side table. He has also injected accents of poppy colours for a more contemporary feel. Chairs in the bedrooms, found at flea markets, have been painted with glossy red lacquer. He painted the central leg of an old coffee table with yellow gloss and topped it with an old marble slab. He has also added bright or patterned cushions. There are orange ones to go with an inexpensive Picasso lithograph and African Kuba cloth to contrast against the contemporary lines of the Carl Hansen chairs in one living room and the Martin Eisler pair in another.
Although Scott has a “great idea of what he wants”, Maclean says, they “didn’t have storyboards. We just moved things and tried things, so it didn’t look too contrived. It was a natural process.” Nothing, Scott insists, was expensive. Hard-wearing metal chairs were bought from Form in the UK, and black metal lamp bases snapped up online. He found the Miró-esque metal daybed in Brussels and the Danish-style mobile was bought from a nonagenarian local artist. They trawled auctions and visited L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a market town known for its antique stores, regularly picking up “bits of junk” as well as pieces Scott now thinks could be treasures. A pair of wall sconces, for instance, “we think are by Charlotte Perriand. And a collection of four giant suns, which could be by Cocteau, in gold leaf, are spectacular.”
Lots of stuff, including three-legged metal tables, which they use as cocktail tables, he bought because it was going cheap. Fireplaces were “saved from old castles that were falling down”. Portraits, no longer fashionable, “look great if you mix them with contemporary furniture”. And Noguchi lamps, with paper shades, “which you can find everywhere. It’s easy for me to mix things about,” he says.
He hopes the whole experience will be fun for guests, who can now stand beside a chariot from Gladiator, or Russell Crowe’s sword, or a costume from Prometheus, have a glass or two of wine and then retreat to the cottages to sleep. “Normally, when a film is finished, all the stuff dies in storage. Everyone forgets it’s there. And it rots. So after every film, I said, ‘Can I buy it?’ Now hopefully it will all come together and make this a place for wine lovers and film lovers.”
Historians might have a reason to visit, too. As the name of the estate, Mas des Infermières, implies, its waters were once considered to be healing, and in the 1800s it was owned by General Baron Robert, the “health officer” of Napoleon’s army. It was here that hundreds of soldiers would have been brought to convalesce. “This place is full of stories,” he says – now with Alien suits and Gladiator chariots to bring them to life.
For more information, see masdesinfermieres.com
THE TIMES