Jean Prouvé's 1958 house is now a Riviera stay below Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Maison Prouvé 58, a low house of aluminium panels and folded steel, now stands among the olives and pines below Saint-Paul-de-Vence and can be booked as a stay through Les Maisons CAB. Jean Prouvé drew it in 1958 with his son Claude for a notary at Epfig, in the Alsace vineyards, 700km to the north.

Hubert Bonnet bought the house in December 2021, by which time it was due for demolition at Epfig. It was dismantled through 2022 and the parts sent to Nancy for restoration, with the Prouvé historian Catherine Coley consulted on the rescue before the house was raised again on the grass here.

The house has two bedrooms in 115 square metres, with a kitchen opening onto the lawn and a metal shell lined in wood and stone. Furnishings include a Prouvé desk and daybed, Charlotte Perriand's Nuage shelving, cabinets by Le Corbusier and pieces by George Nakashima, none of it roped off.

"In Prouvé's work, the structure never hides," Bonnet says. "It becomes the very language of the object or the architecture." Prouvé trained at a forge in Nancy and worked from the idea that a building is made of parts that can be improved joint by joint.

From a 1944 emergency house to a collector's prize

That idea was tested in the worst conditions imaginable. After the bombing of Lorraine, Raoul Dautry, de Gaulle's minister of reconstruction, ordered 800 demountable houses of six metres by six, answered with a frame and panels that three people could raise in a day.

About 400 were actually built, and most were broken up once permanent housing arrived. Collectors later prized the survivors for the same trait that made them useful: they came apart as easily as they went up. The Saint-Paul house came later, drawn for a client rather than an emergency.

CAB counts five such houses from between 1958 and 1961, two of them now gone. At Design Miami/Basel in 2007, Galerie Patrick Seguin offered a Prouvé desk at €200,000 and one of the 1944 houses, built for the homeless, at €280,000.

A dozen houses from Knokke to Essaouira

Bonnet bought his first Donald Judd in 1990 and has collected minimal and conceptual art since, the dealer François Laffanour steering him towards furniture. The houses followed as places to put it all, and about a dozen now operate under the name Les Maisons CAB.

Le Paquebot, at Knokke on the Belgian coast, is a 1936 villa by the modernist Louis-Herman De Koninck, furnished with Aalto pieces beneath a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. Les Ailes, above Lake Geneva, is a 1930s house with Perriand chairs and a living room reworked by India Mahdavi.

The list continues with a chalet at Verbier, a house on Panarea and another inside the walls at Essaouira. At Las Terrenas on the Dominican coast, Marc Corbiau built in white polished concrete, and the Nordic furniture has paled in sun and salt. There is also an apartment on rue Jacob in Saint-Germain.

Guests have the art to themselves, and Bonnet would rather the houses were lived in than looked after. The mas beside the Prouvé was not restored as a period piece: the work went to an architect the source does not name, following Bonnet's own eye.

Beams run overhead and terracotta is underfoot, with vaulted ground-floor rooms opening onto the garden. The stone walls carry works by Viallat, Saytour, Dolla and Dezeuze, painters of the Supports/Surfaces group who removed their canvases from stretchers around Nice in the late 1960s.

The grounds cover 3,881 square metres and include a 1980s pool with a Claudia Comte mural on its long wall. Seven bedrooms across the property allow gatherings of almost any size, and artists have worked and played on this hillside for a century.

Let on request, with time as the luxury

Walking up to the village takes twenty minutes, and Fondation CAB is eight minutes away by car, with a restaurant, a sculpture garden and galleries given to winter residencies. Fondation Maeght, home of the Giacomettis, is slightly further.

Bonnet finds hotels clinical, with check-in at three, check-out at eleven and prices he says have tripled in a decade. He prefers guests to have the run of a place. "I find that normal, to share design, art," he says. "Life is short."

He has often slept in the 6x6 in the foundation's garden, the first Prouvé he could imagine living in, and plans at least a week here with a few books and the phone off. "I love to be stuck," he laughs. "Once you are stuck, there is no way around it."

Maison Prouvé 58 and Le Clos du Père François are let together through Les Maisons CAB, with rates on request. Fondation CAB is also running an exhibition on Prouvé as an inventor of houses, organised with Laffanour Galerie Downtown.

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Images: Les Maisons CAB; (Image credit: Photo by Micha Pycke)