Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The small town of Hauterives in south-eastern France is an unexpected stop on the international tourist circuit. Between 1879 and 1912, its former postman, Ferdinand Cheval, constructed a 26-metre-long, 12-metre-high \u201ctemple of nature\u201d in his vegetable garden \u2014 an endeavour he claimed took \u201c10,000 days, 93,000 hours and 33 years of hardship\u201d. The leading work of naive or \u201coutsider\u201d architecture in France, and a monument to the artistic ambitions of a self-described peasant, the \u201cIdeal Palace of Postman Cheval\u201d has gained the admiration of generations of artists and writers. Cheval was born into a farming family in the nearby town of Charmes-sur-l\u2019Herbasse in 1836. He attended school until the age of 12, before training as a baker\u2019s apprentice. But from 1867, he was employed at Hauterives as a postman and would serve in this office for the next 29 years, each day covering up to 43km on foot.\u00a0\u00a0It was on one such trek in 1879 that he stumbled upon an unusually shaped sandstone, sculpted by wind and water over millennia. This inspired him to embark on a quixotic project, initially called \u201cThe Source of Life\u201d, envisaged as an ensemble of fountains, using stones collected in his wheelbarrow. Every evening and all day on Sundays, alone and often by candlelight, he evolved the structure using lime, shells, cement and iron supports.\u00a0The result was an extraordinary creation that combines elements of the marvellous, the mystical and the grotesque. With deep, kneaded textures, in parts it resembles a plant gone mad or a giant, deformed pastry \u2014 it is clear that \u201cthis is the work of a baker\u201d, says Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Legros, director of the site.\u00a0Using simple workman\u2019s tools, Cheval conjured a work that blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality: a marine monster has both tentacles and a woman\u2019s head; a gargoyle sports a dragon\u2019s maw.\u00a0All my ideas come to me in dreams and when I work, my dreams are always present in my mindCheval never travelled farther than Lyon, or saw the sea. Instead, he educated himself, feeding his imagination with popular illustrated magazines such as Magasin Pittoresque. He endowed his \u201cpalace\u201d with a wealth of animals, human figures and exotic buildings, including a Swiss chalet, a Hindu temple, a mosque and a medieval castle. The elongated bodies of his three \u201cgiants\u201d \u2014 Roman emperor Julius Caesar, Gallic king Vercingetorix and ancient Greek scientist Archimedes \u2014 stretch up the side of the east facade.\u00a0\u201cAll my ideas come to me in dreams,\u201d he once said, \u201cand when I work, my dreams are always present in my mind.\u201d The building is also covered in inscriptions on little plaques set into the stone, which, given Cheval\u2019s m\u00e9tier, seem to resemble envelopes with addresses, copied out painstakingly in his neat handwriting. Some, including an ode to the wheelbarrow, his \u201cfaithful companion\u201d, were composed by him, others by friends and admirers. \u201cTon id\u00e9al, ton Palais\u201d by Emile Roux Parassac, a panegyric in praise of Cheval and his work, gave the monument its name.Even during Cheval\u2019s lifetime, the Palais attracted visitors but its reception in the world of high culture began in the 1930s, when luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Max Ernst, Paul \u00c9luard and Andr\u00e9 Breton made the trip there. The Surrealists refashioned him in their own image as an \u201canarchist\u201d, says Legros. But in fact, \u201che was a public servant\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009he hoped to welcome the president to his building\u201d.\u00a0That didn\u2019t happen but, in 1969, the French culture minister Andr\u00e9 Malraux persuaded the National Assembly to grant the Palais the status of a historic monument. Today, Cheval\u2019s magnum opus \u2014 with its roots in world myth and history, its freshness and unfettered individualism \u2014 continues to astonish its some 270,000 visitors a year. facteurcheval.comFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The small town of Hauterives in south-eastern France is an unexpected stop on the international tourist circuit. Between 1879 and 1912, its former postman, Ferdinand<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":155186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-155185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155187,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155185\/revisions\/155187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}