28 December 2018

Quelques maisons à Noirmoutier




A majority of the houses I saw on the island of Noirmoutier had sky-blue shutters, gates, and other trim. I think that's a feature you see all along France's west — Atlantic — coast. When some people around Saint-Aignan started painting their shutters blue a few years ago, one of our neighbors told me, with regret in her voice, that that blue color used to be seen only in coastal areas.


Nearly all the houses are white-washed — chaulées, as chaux is the word for whitewash. The clean white exteriors and sky-blue shutters give the whole island a neat, well-maintained look. The Michelin guide describes the town of Noirmoutier-en-l'Île as the island's « blanche capitale ». These are photos I took in the peaceful hamlet, or neighborhood, called Le Vieil. Several scenes in the 1972 Claude Sautet movie César et Rosalie, one of my favorites, were filmed here.



Here's a house with shutters and the front gate painted in a deeper shade of blue. It was almost shocking to me when I saw it, because it was an exception that really stood out. "That color doesn't look right," I thought to myself. If all the shutters on these houses are closed up tight, it's because two-thirds of the island's housing stock is made up of résidences secondaires.

And here's another exception — il n'y a pas de règle sans exception. A Noirmoutier tourist site I just read describes Le Vieil in these terms: "Everywhere are small white houses with blue shutters facing the south to expose their gardens to the sun and fill the air with the scents of their seasonal flowers. Take advantage of the calm village... to enjoy a peaceful walk through its narrow streets lined with charming fishermen’s houses."

8 comments:

  1. Shutter colours here are Bordeaux or Basque Red very dark. The traditional colour is slowly changing we now have blue, green, white and even a vivid mauve has crept in.

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  2. I love the sky blue color. The gray shuttered house has the color in vogue in the states now- it's everywhere.

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    1. We just had white roll-down aluminum shutters put on the west-facing windows on the back of our house. We think they'll reflect more heat and help the house stay cooler on hot summer days than it was with the old dark brown steel shutters that we replaced.

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  3. The shutters at my brother's house in Eastern Provence are also painted that same sky-blue color. That color seems to be in fashion all over France.

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    1. Do you remember these photos of different colored shutters that I took in Provence in 2001? There's something very méridional about the shades of blue used on Noirmoutier and also in Provence.

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    2. Whichever browser I use, in order, Puffin, Safari, Firefox and Chrome on my ipad, when I click on the link I get this:

      Invalid securityToken.

      Error 403

      Same thing on my Mac laptop, except I don't have Puffin on it.

      The bright side is we know that Error 403 is an Invalid security Token. Ça me fait une belle jambe! What does that mean, anyway?

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  4. OT, but Townsends had a youtube video about making rice bread - from a 1700s recipe from a South Carolina low country cookbook...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MBxcdv8EDc

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for that link. I'll watch the video now. Rice bread sounds like something I'd like to try my hand at. I'll never forget eating rice for breakfast with home-churned butter on my great-aunt's farm in South Carolina. I don't know if I had ever tasted butter before. I was 10 or 11 years old and we had always used margarine at home.

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