Rhythms of the Baroque
THE moment I saw this place I fell in love with it. This was somewhere that I had lived with in my imagination,’ says William Christie. ‘Finally, I had found the place where I would make a home and a garden.’
Looking with him at a photograph that had been taken at that time of Le Bâtiment, in an isolated rural area of the Vendée region of France, it is hard to understand his enthusiasm. The black-and-white image shows a neglected, unremarkable 17th-century farmhouse, scarred with corrugated iron and with no garden save an ailing boxwood tree. It is a testament to Mr Christie’s imagination and energy that this dream discovery is now, three decades later, an elegant home and a garden so significant that the French government has declared it a Monument Historique.
Mr Christie
