Château de la Calade

Château de la Calade stands at Aix-en-Provence in southern France and was built for Jérôme de Duranti, a member of the early modern provincial nobility and conseiller at the court of accounts, aids and finance for Provence. Construction of the present house belongs to the first half of the 17th century, with one source noting work beginning in 1632 and another a span from about 1634 to 1653. Duranti’s recent ennoblement helps explain the building’s deliberate archaizing exterior, whose proportions and motifs look back to 16th-century models to project a more stately appearance.

The place-name La Calade derives from an agreement of 1454 ordering repairs to the royal road to Avignon; the text required rebuilding a bridge and paving approaches with pebbles so the route would remain passable after floods. The term used for that pebble paving was applied to the surrounding land, then to a nearby country house, and subsequently became attached to the De Duranti la Calade family.

The château originally rose with four towers at its corners; two of those towers were removed during the French Revolution. The site lies close to the banks of the Touloubre river, and later generations made changes mainly to interiors rather than to the building’s main massing. At the start of the First Empire the principal first-floor reception room received a panoramic scenic paper known as les jardins de Bagatelle or jardins anglais, dated to around 1800–1804 in some accounts, while the main bedroom gained a painted trompe-l’œil of draperies.

The property remains in private ownership. The house together with surviving portions of its historic park were inscribed as historic monuments in May 2011, and by decree of 20 January 2015 the château itself received national classification while the dependencies and the park continued under the earlier inscription.