Villa Sestier

Sometimes called Château Sestier, listed on the supplementary inventory of historic monuments in June 2012, is a remarkable Art Nouveau building that is particularly rare in the region. It takes those who see it for the first time by surprise.

Here's a description of the house and its history, as told by its current owners, Mr. and Mrs. Blachier. Visitors sometimes wonder why it was built there, far from any major urban center, when its counterparts are more likely to be found in the suburbs of Nancy, in the Paris region or in seaside resorts. Montélimar undoubtedly has Art Nouveau buildings, as does Romans sur Isère. But these are cities, and the Art Nouveau movement is essentially urban. In Sauzet, we're in a village that in 1905 must have been essentially rural, so this point deserves some explanation. At the end of the 19th century, on the site of the villa, stood a small eclectic-style manor house, of which only a photo and a trace on the park plans remain. This residence had been acquired at the end of the 18th century by Honoré Sestier, notary in Montélimar. In the early 20th century, Honoré Sestier's great-grandson, who had the same first name as his great-grandfather, decided to embellish the property, first by enlarging and redesigning the gardens to create a 7-hectare park, which he entrusted to Gabriel Luizet, the famous landscape gardener.
Luizet succeeded in creating a park that looked like a single piece of land from three very different areas: a wetland at the foot of the Sauzet hill, a vast marl field a little to the east, and a triangular area opposite the previous one but on the other side of a country road.It was necessary to create a false canyon to access this part of the park, and a vast artificial pond on the edge of the road to collect water and purify the land, but also to give the impression of continuity from the house to the ends of the park. Luizet was very proud of this result, and considered the Sauzet park to be his greatest achievement... Of course, there's not much left of it after a century: gardens without constant maintenance are nothing more than ephemeral wonders.However, it was to create a manor house in keeping with the gardens that Honoré Sestier decided to rebuild the present villa in the wake of the Parc, calling on Nicolas Vernon, an architect as renowned in the building trade as Luizet was in the art of gardening. Following the precepts of Art Nouveau, Vernon was responsible for overseeing the entire building, not just the shell, but also the interior decoration and furnishings.However, Vernon did not design the Villa's furniture, as Horta, Guimard or Gaudi had done.It was his friend Francisque Chaleyssin who designed the furniture and decor for the house, while painters Ollier and Baudin created the designs for the stained-glass windows executed by master stained-glass artist Thomas de Valence: "Ollier invit Thomas pinxit1905" can be read on the stained-glass windows over the entrance door. This can be seen in the marked asymmetry of the roofs, the importance of the stained glass windows in the veranda, and the reference to Far Eastern art in the roof ridges, which are intended to evoke the back of a dragon. It does, however, retain some academic aspects that are surprising in this type of building: the veranda with its Doric columns and classical appearance.Not only does the veranda appear a little out of place with the rest of the building, but the carved stones and columns on the veranda are not of the same origin as those used for the rest of the building.The facades of the outbuildings - stables, laundry rooms, janitor's lodge - are more marked by the modernist spirit in their geometric nuances than the Villa itself. The small, baroque-looking garden to the left of the house sometimes comes as a surprise..... In fact, this small garden, recently reconstructed from photos taken in the 1930s, has existed since 1905.It appears on the 1905 plan as a "French garden", and was built by Luizet at the same time as the small "mushroom" kiosk, whose 1900 appearance is more obvious. It bears witness to a certain eclecticism, unless it is a manifestation of the "return to order" that characterized the 1900-1910 period. The "vegetal" Art Nouveau of Horta and Guimard was succeeded by the geometric style of which Otto Wagner in Germany and Mackintosh in Scotland were the most famous exponents, accompanied by a certain return to antique themes...