Here, Marc picks up the phone
A farmhouse from 1787, fifteen years of work, and an owner who shows you around himself.
Passiflore’Art, without the apostrophe
Before Marc, the house belonged to a Belgian couple. The wife was an artist, and she had put passion flowers everywhere: on the entrance gate, on the walls, on the gables. On one of them she had painted Passiflore’Art.
Marc kept the name and dropped the apostrophe. Passiflorart was born.
The story he likes to tell: those Belgians were his parents’ neighbours, when he was fifteen. They stayed six years. When they left, the place amounted to eight beds and no terrace: everything that stands today came afterwards.
A Béarnaise farmhouse from 1787
The date is carved into the house. Two hundred and thirty-nine years later, the stone walls, the roof frame and the shutters are still there, and still in use.
Around it, the old farm has become four buildings: the barn, the Béarnaise house, the old sheepfold, the annexe. Nothing was torn down to build something new.
Ninety per cent of it, he did himself
Marc started in March 2011, with the gîte. The white building held nothing but dormitories back then, without a single kitchen. He turned it into five cottages and a flat, each with its own kitchen and bathroom.
The estate came eight years later. Since then he has barely stopped: the deck around the pool, the timber frame above the tables, and a giant barbecue built on a locomotive chassis.
He is not trying to build a business that runs itself. He is building something someone else will be able to carry on developing after him.
“There are no problems, only solutions.”Marc, owner
What couples remember
Some venues sell you a package and leave you to work the rest out. Here you choose your caterer, your music and your timings, and someone stays reachable while you make up your mind.
When a decoration will not hold, when something needs fixing somewhere, Marc finds a way. That is his phrase, and it is also what comes up most often in what couples say as they leave: not the room, not the pool, but someone who genuinely listened.
The estate keeps changing
New places to sleep, new spaces, seasons that fill up differently. Those who come back a second time always find something that was not there before. A reception venue is never quite finished, and that is usually a good sign.