Since the 1980s
They kept coming back until it stopped being a holiday
Hans and Pascale first came to this part of Gascony in the 1980s. They kept returning, and over the years the region stopped being somewhere they visited and became somewhere they knew: the same lanes, the same markets, the same families, year after year.
They always knew they would buy something here. They spent years looking for the right one.
Built 1776
By the time they found it, it was nearly gone
En Bosc was built in 1776. Two centuries of weather and use had taken most of it, and when Hans and Pascale bought the house it was close to derelict. The pigeonnier — the tower at the end, once a mark of standing in Gascony — was in the worst state of anything.
2001 – 2010
Nine years, and a brief that made it harder
Work began in 2001 and finished around 2010. They set themselves the harder brief: restore what was there rather than replace it, leave the building honestly old, and then add something that was theirs.
That last part came from Asia, where their own story starts. The house is furnished in handmade Balinese mahogany, and the dark carved wood turns out to belong against 250-year-old Gascon limestone. The result is lighter and airier than most French farmhouses, and made to be lived in through spring, summer and autumn.
The pigeonnier was restored last.
All of it, with family
Nine years is long enough that it stopped being a project
It became a habit instead. Children and grandchildren came out each holiday and were handed a spade. The work was the excuse; the point was that a family scattered across several continents ended up in the same place, at the same table, for a few weeks a year.
That is what the house was restored for and it is still what it is best at, which is why we let it to families and groups rather than to couples.
years standing this year, and still doing the thing it was put back together to do.