There’s a new stop on the Julia Child pilgrimage tour—and it’s one you can actually stay (and cook) in. Superfans know, of course, that the kitchen from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home sits behind glass at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.; and real diehards may even have stared up at the façade of 81 Rue de l'Université, near the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where Julia and her husband, Paul, rented a flat while he worked for the U.S. government after World War II and she attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu.
Now, you can actually book a stay in the lovely small cottage the Childs built for themselves in the Provençal countryside, where they entertained the likes of M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard for decades. As we reported earlier, Sotheby’s put the house—called “La Pitchoune” (meaning “the little one”) or “La Peetch,” for short—on the market at the end of last year. It sold soon after, and, now its new owners, Colorado-based couple Yvonne and Makenna Johnston, are turning it into a culinary retreat, an incarnation it previously had in the 1990s when another post-Julia owner ran a cooking school there. (The Johnstons will be adding yoga to the mix, a development of which we’re less sure Julia would approve.)
The official retreat schedule won’t begin until next year, but through Airbnb, the stone-and-stucco tile-roofed cottage is already available as a holiday home for vacation rentals. Built on property that once belonged to Simone Beck, one of Julia’s original cookbook collaborators, La Peetch has three antique-dotted bedrooms, a charming sitting room, and surrounding gardens with a terrace and swimming pool.
As for the kitchen—the only one in any of the great cook’s homes to remain intact, in situ and open—it’s classic Julia, from the wooden countertops to the pegboard pot and utensil storage, painted with the outlines of the original cooking implements that Julia hung there, many of which still remain.
We can’t say that cooking here will instantly turn you into a master of French cooking, but it’ll sure get you well on your way.
Julia Child's House in Provence Is for Sale
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