Villa Benkemoun

Arles sits at the northern edge of the Camargue, the wetlands and rice plains of the Rhône delta where the river meets the Mediterranean. The city itself is dense with Roman amphitheatres, Romanesque cloisters, and the streets that Van Gogh painted; its surrounding agricultural plain is flat, open, and historically given over to hay, then rice, then the slow tourism of the wider Provence-Camargue territory. Villa Benkemoun stands four kilometres outside the city in the Fourchon district, on what were once hay fields, an organic architectural form deliberately designed in the early 1970s as a refusal of the traditional Arles vernacular and a quietly radical experiment in a different kind of French country house.

The villa was designed in 1974 by Émile Sala, an Arles-native architect and Le Corbusier disciple whose work is grouped with the broader European organic architecture tradition that traced its lineage through Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Oscar Niemeyer. Sala approached the commission unusually: he asked his clients, Simone and Pierre Benkemoun, to keep an "information notebook" recording how they lived and how they dreamed of living. The resulting 500-square-metre building rejected orthogonal layouts entirely in favour of curvilinear walls, round and elliptical rooms organised around a central tropical patio, and a sequence of architectural set-pieces that included a capsule-shaped bathroom, a chromed metal fireplace by industrial designer Max Sauze, ceramic floors by Guy Bareff, and cork wall coverings. After the Benkemoun family lived in the villa for forty-five years, Brigitte Benkemoun, the original clients' daughter and a journalist and writer, undertook a meticulous restoration completed in 2017 that returned the building to its original 1970s state. The French Ministry of Culture awarded the villa 20th Century Heritage status in 2015. The villa now operates as a holiday rental sleeping twelve acr