Guy Chalvignac, Jardin décoré de châteaux miniatures / Garden decorated with miniature castles

front of the house and wall along the garden
in 2021 as on Google Streetview

The house pictured above is located in Chaillevette. a commune with some 1600 inhabitants in south-west France, situated on the left bank of the Seudre river in an area with many salt marshes, where oysters are cultivated and traded via the local, picturesque harbour along the Seudre river.

at the right: Château de Beauregard 
this photo (2024) and the next three (2025) \
published here in agremeent with Georges Fontaine

Life and works

The front of the house is provided with a modestly sized art environment, predominantly presenting miniature castles, created by Guy Chalvignac.

Born in 1929 or 1930 in the French area Périgord, Guy Chalvignac settled in the Charente-Maritime department in the early 1950s, first in the Royan area and then in Chaillevette.

He married and had descendants, was a plasterer by trade and retired in 1988.

Château des Milandes

As a child, Chalvignac was already active in doing odd jobs and making all kinds of things.

For example, at a young age he made all kinds of windmills and he also put together a truck, which he could pull with a rope.

He also enjoyed painting, an activity he would pursue throughout his life, also when he was creating the art environment in the front yard. 

That yard has a concrete wall on the right side (seen from the street), which is still unpainted on Google Streetview in March 2021, but in the video below, made in 2024, is provided with colorfully painted scenes

left: Château le Val

From the images of the front garden on Google Streetview, it appears also that the decoration of the front garden with miniature castles must have started after 2013.

This means that Calvignac undertook creatng the ccllection of miniature castles at a later age, when he was already in his eighties.

Working with concrete, he decorated the front garden of his house mainly with replicas in miniature of a variety of French castles. He was a meticulous worker who strove to reproduce architecture of the castles as faithfully as possible

His first project was a replica of the Château de Hautefort, located in the Dordogne. 

Another miniature depicts a castle that, located near where Chalvignac lived was called the Château de Beauregard and is shown on the far right in the second image from the top. 

It was known as the “castle with the six towers” ​​and dominated all the buildings in the area. Legend has it that it was once a refuge for pirates who attacked ships, but the castle is now destroyed.

not identified

Other miniatures of castles created by Chalvignac are the Château de Milandes, the Château de Commarque, both located in the Dordogne, and the Château de Val in de Haute Corrèze.

To conclude this overview, below is an image of the art environment made by Michel Leroux, as it looked in 2019. 

The building in the foreground is Walt Disney's Cinderella Castle, an amusement park in the shape of a castle, located east of Paris.

this image (2019) courtesy of Michel Leroux

In the interior of Chalvignac's house there are also creations he made, in particular a collection of about fifteen models of sailing ships, such as Le Protecteur with 500 pulleys and 64 guns, a ship of the French Navy, designed in 1740 to face the English Navy.

Documentation

* Entry (2022) on the website of Patrimoine et Inventaire de Nouvelle-Aquitaine

* Article (May 2025) in regional newspaper Le Littoral (10% of the text, the full text is copied on Facebook)

Video

* Reel (December 2024) by Karine Bellet, granddaughter of Guy Chalvignac, on Facebook

Guy Chalvignac

Garden decorated with miniature castles

9 rue de la Mairie

17890 Chaillevette, dept Charente-Maritime, region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

can be seen from the street

Google Streetview

Robuste Odin & Erolf Totort, La Robustinie, jardin sauvage et d'art / wild and artistic garden

all pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit
as on Facebook

La Robustinie is a rather special garden in the commune of Pont Audemer in France, which is cared for and includes creations by sculptor and visual artist Robuste Odin and engraver and painter Erolf Totort. 

Both are artists by profession, but they act from their own perspective and way of working, independent of prevailing trends in the art world, an approach similar to that of Chomo in France and Karl Junker in Germany.

The art environment is situated near a building, as shown in the image above. 

This building was in the past a modest farm, which guarded the access to a former tannery, a company that used to dump its waste in a pond in the water-rich area located in the western part of the city of Pont Audemer.

This form of industry has now disappeared and has been replaced by an area with many houses near a variety of lakes and ponds.

In the early years of the 21st century the former farm was taken into use by Robuste Odin, who set up a studio in one of the rooms in the interior.

From the beginning, the development of the terrain near the former farm also had his attention. He was assisted in this by the female engraver and painter Erolf Totort, who lived in Paris.

Robuste Odin was born in Paris in 1964, and studied at the University of Rouen in Normandy. If he studied at an art academy is unclear, but anyhow he developed into a sculptor and metalworker, who as he himself once said "makes strange things with strange things". 

Using all kinds of leftover material from the metal industry, he makes garden furniture for sale and also colorful sculptures, which are placed in the terrain near the house to be further shaped by nature.

Over the years, this area has grown into an extensive, colorful art environment.

In this development of the area near hus house Robuste Odin was assisted by Erolf Totort. who lives in Paris and travels regularly to Pont Audemer.

Born in Paris, Erolf Totort is a pure Parisienne, a child of the left bank of the Seine, an activist who creates decorative work as an engraver, with a passion for prehistory. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts d;ecoratives and art science at the Université Paris VIII.

Robuste and Erolf have invested a lot of time and energy in the design of the art environment near the former farm. 

They focus not only on enriching the site with sculptures, but also pay a lot of attention to sowing and maintaining all kinds of plants that have a beautiful bloom, and also plants that have medicinal properties.

They themselves say that they cannot be surpassed when it comes to giving names to plants that itch or even make you sick.

Over the past twenty years, La Robustinie has grown into an atypical sculpture park that is popular with walkers, school classes, children's classes and lovers of water features in the nearby landscape.

Open days where visitors are welcome  are regularly organised.

Documentation

* Article (May 2025) in French newspaper l'Éveil, focussing on the open days in June 2025

* Publication (May 2025) entitled Fête de la Nature, with a series of images of the art environment

* A series of photos by Sophie Lepetit on Facebook.

Robuste Odin & Erolf Totort

La Robustinie

Chemin de Haut-Ëtui

27500 Pont Audemer, dept Eure, region Normandy, France

can be visited during open days 

Joan Diaz, Casa Pratginestós / Pratginestós House.

all images (2014) by Marcel Albet, from his weblog, 
licensed under Creative Commons 3.0

The house pictured above, with its exterior walls full of decorations, is located in Llinars del Vallès, a municipality with some 9800 inhabitants (2018) in the province of Barcelona, ​​​​Spain, about forty kilometers north-east of the city of Barcelona. 

The house was designed by Joan Diaz, who moved in with his wife and two children, and in 1990 began a decorating project that he would continue for many years.

 

Life and works

Joan Diaz was born in 1941 in the French town of Montauban, at a time when his parents lived there as migrants, having fled from Spain because of the civil war. 

When the war officially ended in 1939, the family soon after his birth returned to Spain and so young Joan would grow up there.

From an early age Joan was attracted to art, he enjoyed painting and drawing, played the violin and the piano, sang in his school choir and played the organ in the local church at weddings.

However, he chose to study technical architecture and architectural drawing, but did not complete it, because he was able to get a job with the municipality of Granollers, which he would hold for 17 years, while at the same time he was working with his father in the family business of building grain silos.

In 1965, at the age of 24, he bought a plot of land in the municipality of Llinars del Vallès, which, like Granollers, was located northwest of Barcelona.

Joan Diaz had acquired sufficient knowledge during his studies in architecture to make the drawings of the design of his future house himself.

The top image in this post shows partly what he had in mind for the building to arise on the corner of three streets.

The front of the house with the main entrance is along the Carrer Carvantes. 

The right side of the house has a slightly receding side aisle, that faces the Carrar Jacint Verdagner and is separated from the street corner by a high wall, provided with a second entrance.

The left side of the house, not visible on the image on top of this post,  is decorated with a low transparent fence that runs from the main entrance to the second side street, the Passage Cervantes.

Behind this fence is an open area, separated from the Passage Cervantes by a stone wall as high as the iron fence, which continues up to the side wall of a neighboring house.

In 1969 the house was ready and Joan Díaz and Asunción Pantanigrós, whom he had married in the meantime, could move in there.

Although he undoubtedly thought about decorating the house, he was too busy in the first decades of his marriage to actually start doing so. The couple had two daughters and their upbringing required a lot of attention, as did the work he did for his father in addition to his own job at the municipality of Granollers

It was not until the end of the 1980s, when he was approaching the age of fifty, that he started taking steps in the direction of creating decorations by undertaking a pilot project. 

This worked out so well that he actually started decorating his house in the early 1990s, a project he continued at least until 2019, when he was approaching the age of eighty.

Joan Diaz created a series of increasingly complex and often large mosaic paintings on both the inside and outside of his house, an imaginative work with many trencadis and wrought iron elements, full of references to the landscapes of the region and to rural and traditional Catalan life.

His wife supported him in his creative activities and, not without reason, the neighbours and the municipality were also positive about it.

The website Artworks from Casa Pratginestós (see Documentation) provides an illustrated overview of what he created in the period 1990=2019.

Documentation

* Weblog (undated) Obras de Arte de Casa Pratginestós (Artworks from Casa Pratginestós) with 190 photos of the site selected by subject and yearof creation. 

* Article (2016) by Jo Farb Hernámdez on website SPACES Archive

* Article (2024) on website Rondaller

* Entry (2024) with a series of photos on the weblog of Marcel Albet

* Entry on the website of Tripadvisor wirh some 30 photos

Joan Diaz, 

Casa Pratginestós  .

Carrer Cervantes, 18, 

08450 Llinars del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain

decorations can be seen from the street
interior is in general not open to visitors
Google Streetview: right side,of the property, left side of the property

Anton Heyboer, Kleurrijk gedecoreerde galerie / Colorfully decorated gallery

images are screenprints from the video in the documentation

The mages in this post represent the decorations applied to the walls and the courtyard of a farmhouse with outbuildings in Den Ilp, a small community in the polder-rich rural area north of Amsterdam.

Life and works

It is the village where Anton Heyboer (1924-2005) went to live in 1961, where he subsequently in the 1960s and 70s became a well known Dutch painter, in 1984 severed all his ties with the established art world and in 2005 died in his sleep.

A lively, in the 1940s traumatic life as a young man

Anton Heyboer was born in Sabang in Indonesia on 9 February 1924, after five months the family moved to Haarlem, in 1925 to Delft, in 1929 to Voorburg, all locations in the Netherlands.

From 1933 to 1938 the family lived in Curaçao, then for some time in New York and before 1940 they moved to Haarlem again.

When in 1940 the German army invaded the Netherlands, the young Anton Heyboer was sixteen years old. Around that time he followed a training as a mechanical engineer.

However, in 1943 he was arrested by the Germans and taken to Germany to work there as a forced laborer, a traumatic experience. He managed to escape and went into hiding in Vinkeveen, a small village south of Amsterdam.

After the Second World War

When the Second World War was over, Heyboer settled in a village in the east of the Netherlands. Here he began to focus on making paintings in a traditional style, which led to his first exhibition in 1946 in another village in the east of the Netherlands.

In 1948 he married and had a son, but his wife divorced him in 1953.

In 1948 he also met the painter Jan Kagie with whom he wandered through France for several months, drawing and painting.

In 1951, Heyboer for a while was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital, this to find assistance in a process of self-realization which had to do with the war trauma he had acquired when staying in  Germany.

In 1956 he married Erna Kramer with whom he was together for seven years and had a daughter.

In 1960 when he was 36, Heyboer met 19 year old Maria, who became the first of the five so-called brides who would join him in living in the art gallery in the community of Den Ilp.

The period of his stay in Den Ilp

In 1961 Heyboer settled in the small community of Den Ilp, where he had bought a piece of land with a cowshed, a terrain he expanded with a variety of other outbuildings. 

The community of Den Ilp is situated north of Amsterdam in a rural area, richly provided with meadows. For him such a rural location was a considerably better location to live and work than the big city.

Over the years, apart from Maria, four more women ("brides") came to live with Heyboer in his gallery in Den Ilp, all of them interesting, intelligent women, who liked to be together with Anton Heyboer.

The 1960s and 70s would be the period in which he became quite well known as an artist who produced sought-after paintings. His work was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was exhibited at the Documenta in Kassel, and he had major exhibitions at the Municipal Museum in Den Haag and the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam (1975).

It was also the period in which he transformed the gallery into an art environment. The images in this post give an impression of the colorful decorations that were not only applied to all the walls of the various buildings, but also adorned the spacious courtyard.

In 1984 Heyboer severed all his ties with the established art world. He continued to work in seclusion in his house in Den Ilp.

In doing so, he also distanced himself in a certain way from the works with which he had previously achieved success, and thus, for example, he repainted almost all of the works that had been exhibited in the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam in 1975.

Anton Heyboer died in his sleep on April 9, 2005 at the age of 81 in his still colourfully decorated home in Den Ilp and was buried in a nearby cemetery in a rural area.

Artistic legacy

The Anton Heyboer Foundation, managed by the Museum van de Geest (Museum of the Mind) in Haarlem, is committed to preserving the legacy of Anton Heyboer. 

Documentation

* Website about Heyboer with many angles

* Website of the Anton Heyboer Society with much info, such as a list of publications about Heyboer

* Wikipedia

* Article (2025) in regional journal Rodi.nl/Purmerend, with a retrospective of Heyboer's life in Den Ilp

* Article  (2024) by Museum Jan, a Dutch museum that had a lot of contact with Heyboer 

* Article (undated) by the Anton Heyboer Foundation

Videos

* Video by iwiws 1951 (2013, YouTube, 4'40")

Anton Heyboer

Colorfully decorated art gallaey

Den Ilp 63

1127 PE Den Ilp, province North Holland, Netherlands

can be seen from the road

Google Streetview, with a varietyof pictures

Remei Mulleras, Can Roseta

images are screenprints from the video in the documentation
published here in agreement with Serflac

The enclosed garden in the image above is situated in a dense oak forest near a farm in the community of Sant Gregor, a village with approximately 3,400 inhabitants in the province of Girona, in Catalonia, Spain.

This garden includes a collection of self-made miniature structures with a specific characteristic, such as the birth of Christ in the image below.

Life and works

The art environment located in the garden is a project undertaken by Remei Mulleras i Mascarel, who was born in 1948 in the nearby farm.

When she was 14 years old she took a course in sewing clothes, which she started making a year later, receiving an official title at age 17.

Her creations became very popular, especially the wedding dresses that she stitched by hand and which all had their own signature.

After working as a seamstress for over thirty years,  in her fifties, towards the end of the 19th century,  she began to tire of making clothes.  

To prevent worse, a doctor advised her to do another line of work. which she did by starting to make  bridal bouquets, which sold well.

Remei Mülleras was also interested in making a miniature representation of the birth of the Christ child, in Spanish called "pesebre" and this became a hobby. 

In Spain such nativity scenes are very popular and municipalities sometimes organize competitions in the month of December to see who made the most beautiful nativity scene. She participated in such a competition and won the first prize.

This inspired her to continue making miniatures and in the year 2000 she started a project to create forty miniatures of churches, in this way presenting these buildings as present in almost all commnes in the region.

In the forest near the farm that was her parental home there were trees that produced cork, which she would use for her creations.

The forest area around the farm also lent itself very well to demarcate kind of a garden where these creations could be siiuated.

That was the beginning of the construction of an art environment, which initially had a size of 

150 m² and would later grow to around 800 m²

When this project of the miniature schurches was finished, she then wanted to show specific miniatures from every region in ​​Catalonia.

It became a new series of projects, in which attention would be given to traditional professions on the one hand and well-known people on the other..

The forge in the image above and the craftsman in the image below give an impression of the series dedicated to professions.

Among the other traditional craftsmen depicted were a baker, a photographer and a mattress maker.

To conclude the different categories of miniatures, here follows a series of images that can be characterized as miniatures of individuals standing alone. 

Remei Mulleras had in mind to give well known Spanish people a place in the art environment and they are also present, but not being from Spain it was difficult to distinguish those well known people..

So, athe image around give an image of individual persons among buildings and places in the art environment, beauitiful sculptures as well.

Documentation

* Article ( 2018) by Jo Farb Hernández on the website SPACES Archives

* Instagram with a series of images

* Article (January 2023) in magazine Lavangardia, with an interview with Remei Mulleras

* A book with a biography of Remei Mulleras, written by Joan Mañé Fort and entitled "Remei Muleras, l'Anima del Pessebre de Can Roseta" (The Soul of the Birth of Can Roseta) was presented on April 20, 2023 on a place in the art environment and in the presence of the mayor of Sant Gregori

Video

Video Provinci de Girona Trip (YouTube, 2020,  45"49'-52"31') by Serflac    

 

Note I would like to remark that biographical aspects in the above text are taken from the article by Jo Farb Hernández, the only review in which these aspects appear

Remei Mulleras

Can Roseta

Sant Gregori, dept Gironna, region Catalunya, Spain

visitors welcome

for groups there is an entrance fee

Google Streetview, with a variaty of photos

H.H. Dijks, Casa Crailo / Crailo House

this image as on Google Streetview

The image above shows the entrance of a house in a suburb in the northeast of the municipality of Lloret de Mar, a city with some 38.000 inhabitants, located along the Mediterranean Sea  in Catalonia, Spain.

The house is located along the Avinguda Roca Grossa and has a fairly large garden with a variety of decorations.

this image (May 2025) and the next six courtesy of Sophie Lepetit 

Life and works

This art environment is most likely a creation of H.H. Dijks, because a plaque in the garden, dated July 2007, is signed with this name.

Such a name is not Spanish, but rather reminds one of the Netherlands, where about a hundred families have that name. 

This assumption is supported by the name of the site, Casa Crailo, because Crailo is a hamlet, part of the municipality of Huizen in the Netherlands. 

Another indication is that the garden has explanatory signs with texts in Spanish, English and ... Dutch.

On a video made in 2020 by Serflac about interesting places in the province of Girona, there are several minutes of images of this art environment (see documentation), but as far as could be determined, so far no review in Spanish has been published regarding this art environment. 

The only text publicly available is written in English, an article by Jo Farb Hernandez, published in 2014 in Spaces Archive. This article does not indicate that she had met the non-professional artist who created the site.

It is clear, however, that in 2014 the art environment was already quite well stocked with creations.

The decorated garden includes plaques depicting deer drinking from a creek (second from the top) or a warrior brandishing a spear (below left).

There are also various three-dimensional creations, such as the ship called Sea Cloud (third from the top) and various animal representations, including various birds, like eagles, herons and waterfowls, like the ons right-below.

There is also a horseman, with a cross on his chest, piercing a writhing dragon.

The art environment was created on a spacious site, which is heavily overgrown with trees and other greenery, and which is situated on a street corner, where a side street ends. 

The garden continues backwards for a considerable length along that side street, separated from the street by a low wall on which a transparent metal fence stands. 

Here and there, small sculptural ensembles can also be seen along that fence.

Documentation

* Artcle  (2014) by Jo Farb Hernandez on the website SPACES Archive

* Series of photos (May 2025) by Sophie Lepetit on Facebook

* Video Provincia de Girona Trip (YouTube, 2020, Casa Crailo:  24'48"- 29'24") by Serflac 

H.H. Dijks

Casa Crailo, 

155 Avinguda Roca Grossa,

17310  Lloret de Mar,dept Girona,  region Catalonia,  Spain

can be seen from the road

Google Streetview

Franco Tondo, Il giardino delle sculture scomparse / The garden with disappeared sculptures

this image and the next one as on Google Streetview

The image above, taken in March 2009, shows what a sculpture garden in Italy looked like as seen from the street.

The image below, taken somet ten years later, in April 2019, shows the same setting, but all sculptures have disappeared. 

Franco Tondo's lost sculptures

The garden with disappeared sculptures, as the site could be called today, was located in the hamlet of Dragoni, part of the municipality of Lequile, a town of about 8,200 inhabitants in the province of Lecce (Apulia region) in the far southeast of Italy.

The terrain on which the sculptures were situated and where Franco Tondo's house also stood, lies along a public road and is separated from it by such a low fence that Tondo's creations could be seen (and photographed) from the road. 

The terrain has now partly become a vegetable garden.

this image and the next four by Filippo Montinari as on Facebook

Virtually no biographical information is available about Franco Tondo. 

His name and the year 1995 have been added to the basis of one of the sculptures. This information makes it clear that the sculptures were made halfway through the last decade of the previous century.

Because the house now has a different owner, it is also clear that Franco Tondo has since died, but how old he was at the time is unknown

Information about the nature of the sculptures that enriched this art environment is actually only available thanks to Filippo Montinari, who took photographs of them, which he published on Facebook (see documentation).

The sculptures that comprise the art environment are about five meters high and what they depict is partly clearly recognizable.

This concerns in particular the group comprising Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus, lying in the manger.

In that group there was also an angel, who held a star, while at the foot of the manger lay a lamb.

Reasoning from the scene with the birth of the baby Jesus, other sculptures can be interpreted as possibly the three Wise Men from the East and others perhaps as the shepherds who stayed in the fields in the vicinity of the stable where Jesus was born.

The sculpture garden also included a piece of land transformed into a large mosaic. This mosaic appears to depict a baptismal font, next to which are two figures, one of whom is making an offering.

A section of the mosaic could also depict a freak and some comets.

Documentation

* Series of pictures of the site (August 2024) by Fillipo Montinari on Facebook

* Article (March 2025) by Giada Carraro on her website Bric-á-Brac Italia

Franco Tondo

The garden with disappeared sculptures

24 Via Solano Li Belli

Lequile, dept of Lecce, region Apulia, Italy

could be seen from the road

Google Streetview