An artist's Provençal farmhouse filled with books, sculptures and collected pieces

“When my husband Christian first brought me to Provence, I fell in love with the place. I wanted to move here straightaway, but he wouldn't hear of it,” says Irish artist Caitriona Platts-Manoury. “He's Parisian. He's a city boy really, but we've managed to turn him into a full-time Provençal.”

Far from being the first artists to fall for Provence, when Caitriona and Christian moved to Saint-Rémy, they joined a long line of talented people who have found a home in this charming region. It was here that van Gogh spent a prolific and pained year as a patient at the Saint-Paul Asylum, painting beloved works such as The Starry Night from the window of his room. He too was taken in by the beauty of the area and created nearly forty paintings of the landscape's emblematic cypress trees over his lifetime. “Everybody talks about the particular light in Provence,” says Caitriona, “and on account of the mistral blowing, the sky is often clear and we get these enormous blue skies. The landscape is just wonderful and draws lots of interesting people to this area. It's a very rich place to live, socially and artistically.”

It is down a long track shaded by those cypress and plane trees that van Gogh loved so much, that Caitriona's house finally emerges. It is a classic Provençal mas of simple architecture and design, dating from the 1800s. “We found the house pretty much as it is now. It wasn’t in pristine condition then, and it still isn’t today, but that doesn’t matter. It’s good enough for us," Caitriona says with a smile. "We like it that way.”

Typical of the old farmhouses in the area, all the major windows face southwards, and all the north-facing windows are tiny, so the couple's first undertaking was to white wash all the walls, drawing in as much of that famous light as possible. “We didn't do an awful lot after that,” she explains. “Decorating has been a gradual process. A logical series of buys, rather than filling it up for the sake of it. We still don't have a huge amount of furniture.”

“For us, simplicity is great, I don't like anything too sophisticated," says Caitriona. “I don't like curtains and fancy fabrics, we just let the light in through the windows and let the art sing. If it happens to be beautiful already, why push it further when you don't need to?"

Even so, the house is far from static and the pair are always creating new things and changing things around. “Quite often, when friends come over, they will point out new things we have switched in, mainly on account of wanting to see our own work in situ, or having bought a new painting from a friend. Personal significance is the most important dimension for any thing in your house to have,” says Caitriona. "Most of our art is collected from friends, or artists who have become friends.”