Zen Hütte

A beautiful day today. After lunch, we walked up to the bergerie (shepherd's hut) owned by our German friends. As if the house was not idyllic enough, they are building a Zen Hütte (Zen hut) in the garrigue behind the house. It's along a winding path, on a little outcrop with a view over the plain (very close to this pear tree in fact). The hut has no particular purpose, other than for being Zen in. Hard not to be in that environment, with classical music rippling from an old transistor radio wedged in the fork of a tree, mingling with the song of the cigales.

After we'd admired it, we went back to sit on the terrace at the bergerie and drink tea. A got out the photo album from their early years there. When they bought the house and land in 1975, it was a ruin. He and his two brothers were studying and working in Germany, but every chance they got they came here and worked on the house, making it up as they went along. A is an architect, but other than that they had no knowledge of building and just relied on a mixture of common sense and inspiration. Occasionally they got help, as on the memorable occasion when a dozen people from the village came to help them pour the concrete floor, but mostly they worked on their own.

It was fascinating looking through the album of faded photos, not just to see the brothers in their 1970s uniform of long hair, beards and bellbottoms, and the gradual appearance of girlfriends, wives, and offspring, but also to see how much the landscape has changed. They had some friends who piloted small planes from the local aerodrome so they have quite a few aerial photos from almost 40 years ago. There were still sheep on the mountain then, and it was bare compared to nowadays. The house is now surrounded on three sides by dense garrigue and trees, and has an olive grove in front of it; none of that was there then. We could see how the village has grown too, new housing estates replacing vines.

An interesting visit! The place is beautiful now, lived in and blending into the landscape it is a part of, but what an impressive achievement it is, the fruit of imagination, commitment, and hard work.