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Clapier-Cabris house
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Coming from one of Provence's oldest families, the Grasse family, Jean-Paul Clapier, the marquis de Cabris, marries Louise de Riqueti, daughter of the Marquis de Mirabeau "mankind's friend" and sister of Honoré-Gabriel Mirabeau, future deputy of state in 1769.
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The couple, which met only on the eve of their marriage first moves into a posh home on the outskirts of town belonging to the young man's mother. After repeated conflicts with the dowager marquise, Jean-Paul de Clapiers Cabris decides to build his own home just in front of his mother's, so as to block her view of the step-cultures and the coastli. To definitively spite her, he also commissions a sculpture of a Gorgon's head vomiting vipers which he has placed just over the front door, directly in the old woman's line of sight.
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Nothing is too good for this new home. Jean-Paul Clapier Cabris wishes to rival the homes of Aix he had discovered as a student. The conception is assigned to an architect of Milanese origin, Jean Orello, who imagines what will remain one of the most elegant homes in Provence, despite its unmistakably Italian spirit, with its colored facade marked by large horizontal bands of white limestone. Nothing is too beautiful for the home's interior decoration. The marquis, a whimsical and somewhat daft character, spends his money loosely : the woodwork and furniture are commissioned from Paris, the entrance hall is decorated with bas-reliefs executed by the sculptor André Brenet, The marble comes from Marseilles, the earthenware tiles from the north of France. These expenditures grant an unmistakable charm and grace to the home, while ruining its owners. As a result, the work is never really completed. The new home is put up for auction in 1813 by the de Navailles Countess, the couple's only child.
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Though the building crosses the period of revolutionary turmoil unscathed, it is subsequently pillaged by its new owners who sell the decorum and transform it into the annex of a neighboring perfumery and in apartments to let. Not content to simply accumulate collections, François Carnot, the museum's founder, tries to restore the home's aristocratic atmosphere, assigning each object, as much as possible, its logical place within a house : it is thus in this way that the parlor, bedroom, kitchen, are reconstituted.
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