Maison Heureuse de Saint-Georges-d'Oléron, Historical monument in Boyardville, France.
Maison Heureuse de Saint-Georges-d'Oléron is a protected building in Boyardville with a central structure featuring a square floor plan and lateral ground-level sections. The complex combines multiple connected spaces arranged to create a functioning compound from the early twentieth century.
The site was first built up from 1804, when housing was needed for some 300 workers and support staff constructing Fort Boyard, giving rise to the village of Boyardville. After the fort was finished the area was abandoned, then housed a torpedo school from about 1811. Left unused after World War I, it was converted into a holiday camp in 1927 and from 1937 took in Spanish refugee children until the start of World War II. The buildings were listed as monuments historiques in 2004.
The name "Maison Heureuse" (Happy House) appears in a recollection of a camp counsellor who worked there for the "Enfance Coopérative": he describes a large pink house on the sand spit at the mouth of the "Grand Canal". From 1937 it housed Spanish children who had fled the Civil War, until the start of the Second World War.
The complex stands at the end of impasse avenue de la Plage in Boyardville, near the beach at the mouth of the Grand Canal. Since 2023 it has been a private luxury residence of sixty-three flats, so the grounds and interiors are not open to visitors; the ochre facade, white bands and stone base are seen from the street.
The 2023 conversion into 63 flats was carried out by the agency Perrot et Richard architectes for the François 1er group, which bought the site in 2018. The brief was to keep the seaside and regionalist architecture of the listed buildings. In 2015 a ZAD opposed a planned high-level sports rehabilitation centre, and its occupants were evicted on 21 April.
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