Julia Child’s Sweet French Kitchen (and Its Small Cottage) Listed at Less Than $1 Million

Julia Child’s French country cottage is for sale on the open market for the first time, with the only true “Julia Child kitchen” extant in a private home.

Dubbed La Pitchoune, “The Little One,” the 1,600-square-foot getaway is exactly what you’d hope of the world’s first celebrity chef, who brought French cooking into the everyday American kitchen. But it’s perhaps not what you’d expect, if when you hear “chef” and “French” you imagine men in giant toques and tiny mustaches sniffing haughtily at glasses of wine.

The Provencal kitchen is bright and cheerful, homey and stuffed with cookware, some of them her original pieces. She hung her cookware and gadgetry on a pegboard, and her beloved husband, Paul, outlined each item’s location – just as things were in her main kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now forever preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. (Pictures of the Smithsonian kitchen are at the bottom of this post.)

La Pitchoune’s kitchen has scarcely changed over the decades. Here it is now:

And from nearly the same angle in 1978, with Julia Child herself:

“I like things to hang up,” Julia Child told the Smithsonian Magazine as the Massachusetts kitchen was being packed up to head to Washington, “so Paul made a diagram of where everything goes. It’s nice to have them back where they belong.”

Paul Child had designed the kitchen in France as well as the one in Massachusetts, in part to save money but also to accommodate his wife’s particular preferences – as well as his wife’s height. At 6-foot-2, she loomed over most of their small European kitchens, a vision he captured often with his camera. So the countertops he designed for her are higher than usual.

The two were inseparable, and Paul Child was prone to writing letters and poems of adoration over his wife and her cooking.

“If we could just have the kitchen and the bedroom, that would be all we need,” she told the Smithsonian.

[Related: Rachael Ray Says Guests Are ‘Shocked at How Tiny My Kitchen Is’]

The vacation cottage was built in 1963 on property owned by her best friend, Simone Beck, who co-authored “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with Child. They had a “handshake deal” agreeing that the Childs would give the house back to Beck and her family when they were done using it.

Here it is in context, with the cottage at upper right:

La Pitchoune is about half an hour’s drive from Cannes and the Cote d’Azur, on a hillside in a small village called Plascassier:

Child, her husband, and their friends often referred to it by a pet name, “La Peetch.” The Childs visited the house every year, traveling from any of Paul Child’s diplomatic European posts and later from their home in Massachusetts, and entertained other culinary giants there, including James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher.

The house has never been on the open market before. The Childs used it from the time it was built until around 1991, when Paul Child’s health began to fade and Beck died, and then it returned to Beck’s family. In 1993, an American named Kathie Alex, who knew and studied with Child and Beck, turned La Peetch into a culinary school called Cooking With Friends in France.

Alex closed the school this year because of health reasons. Although Sotheby’s International Realty does not disclose the price in its listing, the Los Angeles times reports that she’s asking about $860,000.

The half-acre property includes the cottage, with three bedrooms that the listing describes as “cozy,” each with its own bath; as well as a separate one-bedroom studio structure with a living room, kitchenette and bathroom.

(Living room.)

(Living room.)

(“Cozy” bedroom with en suite bathroom.)

(Al fresco dining, anyone?)

(The half-acre property includes a pool, as well as a separate studio building with another living room, a bedroom, a kitchenette and a bathroom.)

(Child in 1981.)

Child died at age 91 in 2004. Meryl Streep recently played her – to much acclaim, of course – in the film “Julie & Julia.”

Visitors can see her former Massachusetts home kitchen – which bears similarities to the French kitchen in La Pitchoune – at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington (photos by Getty Images):

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