Eric Idle has spent 55 years turning a three-room shack in Provence into a 22-acre refuge from fame. Adrian Chiles is right to frame it as an escape that became a working life: the private retreat now sits at the center of Idle in Provence: A Brief History of Thyme.
In 1972, Idle first came to Provence and bought the shack with no road, water or electricity. He later said, “It was just idyllic. It was fantastic. I said, ‘I think I can write as badly here as I can in London’.”
1972 in Provence
He said he first came to Provence in the early 1970s after 15 years in London and work at the. The move was not a retreat in the abstract; it started with a three-room shack and a property that had to be built out piece by piece, the kind of slow expansion that turns a basic rural purchase into a long-term base.
Idle put that plainly: “We built everything bit by bit.” He also said he had a little writing shack up in the woods that burned down in 1979, which makes the timeline of the place feel less like nostalgia and more like repeated repair, reinvention and persistence.
22 acres and famous visitors
Over the next 55 years, the site became a 22-acre “shackeau,” and the list of visitors explains why it outgrew a simple private address. David Bowie, George Harrison and Ronnie Wood all stayed there, turning the property into a kind of informal cultural outpost.
Idle’s own account keeps that contradiction intact. He describes the place as peaceful and private, yet he also describes it as a celebrity hideaway. That is the useful fact here: the retreat worked because it was secluded enough for him, but visible enough to attract the names who moved in his orbit.
Cotignac and the book
He said he divides his time between Los Angeles and Cotignac, and he added that the locals in Cotignac do not care about celebrities and are simply getting on with their own lives. He also said, “I was [seen as] a visitor for many years,” which is the cleanest line in the story about how long it took for the place to feel settled.
Idle’s book, Idle in Provence: A Brief History of Thyme, is the immediate next step. The point for readers is simple: this is not a memoir of a holiday home, but the record of how a 1972 purchase became a 22-acre working refuge, and how a man who once came to Provence for quiet ended up building a celebrity address without surrendering the privacy that drew him there in the first place.
