Peter Mayle, whose book ‘A Year in Provence’ popularised the region, is selling his house in Provence. Some might feel this is the end of an era or just selling out or killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Reading the news about the sale, his house is not actually the house the books described. It's the one he could afford after the sales of the book. And very nice it looks too.
"Three storeys high, the 600sq m (6,458sq ft) house is shaded by enormous plane trees, and has several terraces overlooking either formal gardens or the large infinity pool..."a sublime and authentic property away from inquisitive eyes”, the many-shuttered house stands in 5.7 hectares of grounds that include an olive grove, a rose garden, two ponds and a vegetable garden. There’s an orangery, a dove cote, a summer diningroom and a wine cellar."
So what happened? "Clearly this isn’t the house that Mayle, a former advertising executive who gave up his job to move to France in the mid 1980s, wrote about in his best selling first book. That was a modest farmhouse Menerbes. However, the book was so popular that he found himself under siege from a constant stream of visitors wanting to meet Mayle." So he went to America.
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