Tarascon, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur 13150

A small eighteenth-century town house with a patio, nestled on a calm, elegant street in the heart of the old Provenal town of Tarascon. From the fifteenth century, the prosperity of Tarascon drew many families: aristocrats as much as merchants and upper middle classes. Clergymen also came. These newcomers built grand private houses: they were keen to leave their mark on the town. The town houses of Tarascon often display rich architectural embellishments in the style of Provenal Mannerism, which dominated in the seventeenth century. But some of these town houses were also plain and small. Since the Middle Ages, town houses have been defined as simply urban dwellings occupied by single owners, so their size does not really determine their category. It was mainly from the eighteenth century onwards that small town houses - those with a floor area of less than 300m - were built along commercial streets within Tarascon itself, where they were sheltered from the cold mistral wind of winter and from the hot sun of summer. They were made for wealthy merchants rather than for nobility and their style differs to that of grand, sumptuous palaces. The bombings of the Second World War damaged Tarascon but left almost all these old town houses intact: these historical dwellings were not close to the town's strategic rail line, nor to the bridge across the River Rhne. These homes were often built upon ruins from the Middle Ages or antiquity and they all adopted a similar layout. Moreover, they are all made of the same fine materials: old monk-and-nun tiling, large tiles of grey Barbentane stone, wrought-iron window railings and walls made of limestone from the quarries of Les Baux-de-Provence and Fontvieille. Furthermore, they often reused fragments of column shafts from antiquity. Indeed, reuse of materials from the old remains upon which they were built is a constant feature among them.