GREEN ACRES (L'édition française)
In the spring of 2020, when the whole world suddenly came to a halt, city dwellers began concocting all kinds of escape fantasies. Some imagined moving to a rural area and becoming sustainable farmers; a number nursed long-dormant artistic ambitions; still others devised plans for new tech ventures, with visions of blockchains dancing in their heads.
But one Parisian couple, Victoire de Pourtalès and Benjamin Eymère, dreamed up a project that combined all three of these scenarios, plus a few more. Their bold new venture, as Eymère explains while steering his Citroën Ami electric buggy toward their hemp field in the French countryside, is a kind of highbrow ecological amusement park: “an open-sky R&D laboratory” that links art, nature and science.
It helps that the couple’s new base of operations is Le Château du Marais, a magnificent 980-acre estate in the French countryside that’s been in de Pourtalès’s family for generations—and that gives
