Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph
MonumentHidden Treasure
Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph, located in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), is a Renaissance château built in the 16th century. The monument is currently closed to visitors.
Key facts
- Type
- autre
- Period
- Renaissance (16th century)
- Location
- Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
- Visit
- Closed to visitors
- GPS
- 43.3518, 5.3864
- Mérimée Reference
- PA00135622
On the hills of Saint-Joseph, this Marseille bastide dating from the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries embodies the art of Provencal living at its most authentic, with its park, cistern and preserved outbuildings.
History
Nestling in the Saint-Joseph district of Marseille, the Vallon Giraudy country house is one of those discreet gems that the city of Marseille hides in its golden hills. Far from the hustle and bustle of the Old Port, this estate is a rare and precious example of Provençal domestic architecture from the end of the Grand Siècle, a period when the great families of Marseille vied with each other in the elegance of their holiday homes. The Provençal bastide is an architectural type in its own right, distinct from the Italian château or villa: it is distinguished by its compact volume, its ordered but unostentatious facades, and its intimate relationship with the garden and landscape. The Vallon Giraudy estate is an admirable example of this ideal, with a building complex that has managed to retain most of its original appearance over the centuries. Its partial listing as a Historic Monument in 1995 confirms its exceptional heritage value. The estate captivates visitors with the coherence of its ensemble: the manor house, the farm outbuildings that bear witness to a once flourishing rural economy, the 19th-century cistern that recalls the hydraulic ingenuity typical of the bastides of the Midi, and a pleasure garden laid out around 1850 in the Romantic style then in vogue. A whole civilisation of the Marseilles region is on display here. For visitors with a passion for heritage, the bastide of Vallon Giraudy is an open window on the secret Marseille of notables and merchants, the city that prospered on the wooded heights while the port buzzed below. Photographers and architecture enthusiasts will find the site an inexhaustible source of inspiration, from the play of Mediterranean light on the ochre facades to the serenity of the formal garden.
Architecture
The bastide of Vallon Giraudy is part of the tradition of Provencal bastides in Marseille, an architectural type codified at the end of the 17th century and characterised by a massed plan, a regularly ordered main facade and a low-pitched roof covered with canal tiles. The main building, built between around 1680 and 1720, displays the formal characteristics of southern classicism: windows framed by sober mouldings, corner quoins emphasising the massing, and a play on symmetry that bears witness to the influence of architectural treatises published in Paris and Lyon. The local materials - Provençal limestone and lime renderings - give the whole building the luminous blond hue that is so characteristic of buildings in Marseille. In addition to the manor house, the estate includes a series of agricultural and rural outbuildings, of which the building erected in 1819 is the best-dated example. The cistern, an essential functional element in a region with high levels of evapotranspiration, plays an integral part in the estate's composition. The pleasure garden, redesigned around 1850, incorporates the conventions of the Romantic garden - winding paths, planting a variety of species, landscaped perspectives - in the context of a Provençal terroir where the natural slope of the valley structures the overall landscape composition. The partial listing on the Monuments Historiques list suggests that certain parts of the estate - undoubtedly the façade of the main building, the gardens and certain outbuildings - are of a higher architectural and historic quality than other parts that have been modified or are less well preserved. This kind of selective protection is common in the bastides of Marseille, where successive alterations have sometimes altered the original coherence of the whole.
Related Figures
Famille Giraudy — famille de notables marseillais dont le nom est attaché à la bastide et qui en furent vraisemblablement les commanditaires ou les propriétaires au tournant des XVIIe-XVIIIe sièclesJean-Baptiste Colbert — ministre de Louis XIV dont la politique de port franc (1669) enrichit les familles négociantes marseillaises à l'origine des grandes bastidesPropriétaires anonymes du XIXe siècle — responsables des transformations de 1819 et de l'aménagement romantique du jardin vers 1850
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph located?
Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph is located in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône department, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, France.
When was Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph built?
Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph dates back to a period built during the Renaissance (16th century).
Is Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph open to visitors?
Bastide du Vallon Giraudy, quartier Saint-Joseph is currently closed to visitors.