Bibliothèque les Deux-Ormes – Aix-en-Provence

January 3, 2023 In Libraries

To the west of Aix en Provence in southern France lies the former family home of painter Paul Cézanne. Built by Georges Vallon (who designed the Aix granary where the Halle au Grains library now is), the house was named “Jas de Bouffan” after the bastide and sheep farm that was there originally. In 1969, the city of Aix zoned much of the area for housing, in part to accommodate the population surge that followed the independence of Algeria and the repatriation of inhabitants of the former French colony. This new development was named Jas-de-Bouffan in honour of Cézanne’s home.

Interior of an old bastide house transformed into a library with wooden beams showing on the ceiling, arched doorways and modern wooden shelves along the walls.
Interior of an old bastide house transformed into a library, showing a doorway with a whitewashed wooden door and a window.
Interior of an old bastide house transformed into a library, showing a room with a slanted roof with exposed wood beam and rolling boxes full of children's books on the tiled floor.

This development replaced an area of farms, pastures and vineyards, and the forest that produced wood for Aix’s safety match factory that would later become the Méjanes main library. Among those hills was another bastide, which first appeared on official records in 1658. The property, which originally included the main living hall, a farm hall and several hectares of cultivated land, was acquired by the city of Aix in 1986 and transformed in a branch of the Méjanes library for the Jas-de-Bouffan neighbourhood in 1993.

Interior of an old bastide house transformed into a library, showing a room with a slanted roof with exposed wood beam and rolling boxes full of children's books on the tiled floor.
The children’s area in what looks to have been the former stables. Like in other Méjanes locations, all shelves are on wheels allowing for ready reconfiguration of the spaces.

Little information is available about the history of this building and its transformation, but it’s a lovely haven of calm and greenery in the middle of the Aix suburb, as a small park remains from the original property to surround the bastide with manicured lawns and mature trees.

Exterior of a traditional French bastide house in a lush green park, with trees in the foreground.
Bibliothèque Méjanes – Les Deux-Ormes in a former bastide west of Aix-en-Provence is a small haven of greenery among the 1960s neighbourhood of Jas-de-Bouffan.

I visited this library in September 2021 together with two other libraries in Aix. Don’t miss my article on the main Méjanes library in the former Manufacture des Allumettes, or the one in Halle aux Grains on the main market square.

This post is part of a series on adaptive reuse in libraries. See the list of such projects I am maintaining or view other posts in this series.

References

  1. Au pays des bibliothèques d’Aix-en-Provence. (2021). Côté Méjanes, pp. 4–5.
  2. Chronologie de la Méjanes. (2015). Cité du Livre.
  3. Une bibliotheque au coeur des Deux Ormes. (2014). Anonymal TV.



Content note

Library detail pages are primarily a place for me to collect information I gather on the libraries I visit, and are frequently updated. None of this should be considered authoritative, I am not an architect, nor a historian. If you notice something incorrect, please let me know!



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