At Pierre Yovanovitch’s 17th-century Château de Fabrègues, change is a constant. “To bring new life, it’s important that things are ever evolving,” the AD100 designer says of his Provençal estate, home to an ongoing series of artist residencies and site-specific commissions. “I didn’t want creative input to stop once our initial renovations were done. I view the property as a platform for expression.” Following in the footsteps of Claire Tabouret, Johan Cretan, and Alicja Kwade, painter Matthieu Cossé has now left his mark, transforming one of the estate’s four distinctive turrets into a sylvan panorama. Inspiration came from Fabrègues’s own grounds, masterfully transformed by AD100 Hall of Famer Louis Benech (AD, April 2018). Executed over the course of three weeks in a traditional fresco technique, Cossé’s exuberant brushwork depicts the property’s flora and fauna season to season, with Yovanovitch’s chickens, donkeys, peacocks, and sheepdogs frolicking amid the linden trees, lavender fields, and boxwood parterre. “You are very much in the wild nature,” Cossé says of Fabrègues. “I wanted to reflect that.” For Yovanovitch, the mural has become a new source of daily wonder: “I still discover new details every time I look at it.”
