As a teenager in the late 1980s, home from boarding school in Britain during half-term, Nicolas Mazet remembers the solitary experience of exploring the quiet streets of Paris when all the local kids were still at school. A Canon EOS 650 camera in hand, he liked to document the local street art — a nascent interest that later influenced his career path.
He spent a lot of time in Aix-en-Provence, too, the Provençal city near the property where his paternal grandmother lived. He would pass through the bougie Mazarin quarter, the streets lined with the one-time 18th-century homes of the nobility. He recalls glimpsing through the gate of the house on rue Cardinale where his grandparents had once lived, and being struck by the towering, honey-coloured stone facade set back from a large garden shaded by the canopies of century-old chestnut and linden trees.
After the second world war, Mazet’s grandfather had purchased the stately ground-floor and third-floor apartments of this grandiose hôtel particulier (the second floor belonged to another family). Later, the couple acquired a neighbouring outbuilding, a one-time brothel, which they converted into a rental. The real estate remained in the family as an investment with tenants.
Mazet thought little of the site again until around 15 years ago when he was organising small art shows in his apartment in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. The side gig, which he called “App’ART” — for apartment and art — had thus far been a modest success. Early exhibitions featured the work of the Italian paparazzo Marcello
In 2010, he came across the work of the French painter and sculptor François Arnal, who had a fabled background as a resistance fighter and romantic links to Marlene Dietrich. Arnal’s large-scale expressive canvases would crowd his apartment, but as luck would have it, the family’s former Aix abode had just become vacant. “My father wanted to sell the ground floor [there were still occupants on the upper floor], but I convinced him to let me have it over the summer,” Mazet explains. “So, I rented a truck and drove the 50 works, paintings and sculptures from Paris.” That inaugural show featured Arnal’s works inside, while Mazet recruited local street artists to exhibit their work in the garden.
Mazet’s father never sold the property, and subsequent summer exhibits led Mazet to establish Gallifet, a private contemporary art centre named after the original family who built the home. In 2016, he permanently relocated from Paris and moved into the third-floor apartment. His British partner in work and life Kate Davis, a former lawyer, joined him in 2020.
Over a four-month period, the couple renovated the space into a spacious three-bedroom abode, taking care to respect the historic bones, including timeworn tomette flooring, gilded paintwork and miniature frescoes in the spacious main salon. The home has the same generous volumes as a noble floor (historically, the first floor of a residence, sometimes called bel étage in France) and an enfilade of rooms with double French windows and a leafy outlook over the courtyard garden. They installed two modern bathrooms and a well-appointed marble kitchen — fragrant on the day we meet with fresh-cut basil and furnished with pottery from local ceramic artist, octogenarian and friend Nelly Bonnand.
Over the years, the couple has furnished their home with artworks, books and objects that hold sentimental value, acquired from their travels and the artists they work closely with. “A lot of what makes it home has happened over time since living here together and comes from the art, ceramics, lamps and furniture that we have chosen together,” Davis says of how they have decorated their space.
Much of the work is highly sentimental: original prints from the early Marcello Geppetti show, canvases from the Arnal show, as well as a bas-relief work in paper by the French artist Antonin Anzil and a lush, metallic woven work by the fibre artist Morgane Baroghel-Crucq, who curates their winter programme, which is centred on the métiers d’art, or art professions. “It’s almost as if we have lived with all these works when they’re downstairs in the show, and then you have this very strong sense of the ones that you don’t want to leave,” says Davis of their most treasured possessions. “We collect memories of moments past,” agrees Mazet, who says they tend to identify with the French term passeur — meaning a sort of conduit. “Our job downstairs is to pass and to share.”
Perched above the treetops, the home feels like a world away from the gallery below, though the couple commute 20-plus times a day. “We are deeply lucky to live here, but we effectively live above the shop — we live where we work,” says Davis of the oft-indiscernible line between the two. (A retired lawyer owns the middle-floor apartment).
If visitors once sought out Aix for its Impressionist landscapes and surrounding lavender fields, Mazet and Davis have helped to re-energise the city with a dynamic year-round programme of exhibits featuring established and emerging international artistic talent.
Success has been hard won. “We’re in a very traditional part of France, and contemporary art wasn’t available to most Aixois,” Mazet says of the long-established mix of country life and old families with a taste for antiques and erudite traditions — the local university, established in 1409, has one of the country’s most prestigious law faculties. (Cézanne, arguably one of the most well-known Aixois, was even rebuffed by the local fine art museum Musée Granet during his lifetime.)
“I spent the early years trying to entice my generation to curiosity, and my cause has been with the locals who were so used to their long-established environment and cultural references,” he adds. He also credits nearby Château La Coste, the epic modern art and architecture folly, which opened to the public in 2011, to “attuning people to the importance of contemporary art”.
The couple often conceives the summer exhibition programme at Gallifet with a political thread. The current summer exhibit, Passe-Muraille, running until October 6, highlights a selection of works from the renowned French gallerist Yvon Lambert’s private collection, including works by 25-plus artists such as Nan Goldin, Sol LeWitt and François Halard. They hang in the salons where Mazet’s family once slept and entertained, and architectural flourishes from their era — the same as upstairs — remain intact. “I wanted to keep a few of those details, so it’s not a white cube feeling,” he says.
A red resin sculpture of a swimmer coming up for air by the Senegalese artist Diadji Diop “Nager dans le bonheur” (Swimming in Bliss), from a previous show on immigration (a similar version of which is outside Le Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris), has a permanent place in the courtyard today. Throughout our conversation, Mazet gently discourages one of the visiting children from climbing on its head. “That must happen often,” I say. He shrugs and smiles.
Since Davis’s arrival in the business, the couple has evolved the somewhat modest tea room in the garden into a seasonal restaurant run by a roster of visiting chefs. Open in parallel with the summer art programme, they turn over 70-80 covers at lunch and 50 for a dégustation (tasting menu) dinner — a boon that now essentially funds the gallery. “We knew we had an incredible tool at our disposal — in terms of the magic of the space and the product, and we knew this could be exciting for someone, so we thought, let’s try to punch above our weight a bit,” Davis says of their early ambitions.
Since then, up-and-coming culinary talent, such as the current chef-in-residence, Londoner Josh Dallaway (of Bar Bruno), has focused on dishes that showcase the best of what Provence has to offer. The wine list, too, is hyperlocal and dynamic, covering the region from “Bandol in the east to Banyuls in the west.”
Davis and Mazet have cultivated relationships with nearly 20 local producers, many of whom have regular stalls at local markets. On a morning trip to pick up the bread this August, Davis stops to talk with at least nine different people before she has reached her destination. There is a sense that this community and the seasons define the couple’s way of life at Gallifet.
In winter, their routine takes on a different cadence. The nights are cool enough to light a fire in the salon in the evening, and they head for long walks in the Alpilles mountain range with their dog, Sidney. “The city is not our city in the summer; it’s lively and wonderful, but there is this moment, on the first of October, when we get the city back — the light and air is purer, the light is clearer — and it’s calm again,” says Davis.