MONASTIC MINIMALMISM

La Manufacture Royale de Lectoure is a home-scale retreat experience that is restorative, stylish and quietly simmering with French art de vivre.

- JEREMY CALLAGHAN

Old walls are comforting. We reclaim them; ushering them forward into new times. We conserve traces of their history and, like the lines on an old face, we take reassurance from the stories evoking a sense of ‘if walls could speak’. And sometimes, like Christèle Ageorges, the owner of this now-beautiful home, we embrace the canvas they offer – the invitation to create something new.

Every year, Christèle and her husband Hubert Delance would walk a section of the celebrated pilgrim trail, the Way of St James. In 2017 the path led them up a steep promontory known as Lectoure. In the 1500s this fortification had the defensive advantage of height. Today, the history remains in the remarkably intact traditional village of Lectoure, which looks over the rich, fertile plains below the Pyrenees mountains between Bordeaux and Toulouse in France’s Gers region. It’s as pretty as a picture.

“We were both instantly enchanted,” says Christèle. Just a few steps off the main street of Lectoure, a former spa town, the couple chanced upon the dilapidated remains of what was originally La Manufacture Royale de Lectoure (The Royal Tannery). Built by French architect Pierre Racine in 1754, its most recent incarnation had been as a retirement home, but the property had been abandoned for some 30 years and was on the market for more than a decade.