Makenna Held fell in love with La Pitchoune, the Provence, France, dwelling of late celebrity chef Julia Child, after reading about its return to market in a 2015 New York Times article. Sight unseen, she purchased the icon’s former estate and moved to Châteauneuf de Grasse to open The Courageous Cooking School, where home cooks can learn the fundamentals of developing dishes from scratch without using recipes. Below, Held explains what it’s like to live in a home stuffed with culinary memories and shares how she and her team are carrying Child’s legacy forward, as told to Juliet Izon.
I found out the house was on the market because I went to Julia Child’s alma mater, Smith College, and was part of a forum on Facebook for alumni. There was a post about the listing and that was really interesting for someone like me, who went to Smith, loved food, and loved France. So I called the real estate agent, but the house had already sold. When I found out, I was really bummed; I’d already thought through a lot of the process of potentially launching a business there and sent emails to investors asking, “Hey, do you wanna buy Julia Child’s house? How cool would that be?”
But then, surprisingly, it went back on the market. I got on the phone with investors and we talked to the real estate agent, mortgage brokers, and lawyers, about all the things we had to do to make the purchase happen. One of the investors flew out the next Tuesday, saw the place on Wednesday, we put an offer in on Thursday, and it was approved on Friday. And that was that. I had never seen the house.
