She Dreamed of Living in an Ancient Tower—and It Came True

Eva Claessens’s decision to buy and restore a dilapidated 10th-century building in a tiny French village started with a dream. In the spring of 2020, the Belgian-born artist woke up with a vivid image of a home in Provence and took it as a fait accompli. "I bought all my houses because I saw them in a dream, as clearly as a photo," she says matter-of-factly. "I always take dreams very seriously. They are so important." Eva was in South America at the time, in the rural plains of Garzón in eastern Uruguay, which has been her main home for the last 15 years. Although the pandemic was still raging, she found a way to make it back to Europe.

There were some twists and turns along the way, but Eva’s keen senses led her to an empty building in the Var, an area in Provence known for its scenic hilltop hamlets. The structure didn’t look like much at all: a rectangular "tower," as she calls it, three stories tall, with crumbling stone walls, no roof, and soil for parts of the ground floor. The building had once been part of a fortified wall that had encircled the local town. The painter and sculptor, known for her ethereal outlines of human bodies, liked that it had wide spaces she could turn into art studios and was undaunted by the prospect of elaborate renovations, but more than anything, she felt a visceral connection to this unusual place. "The first time I walked by the facade, I had butterflies," she says.