Le domaine du Coscro, lauréat du Grand Trophée Dassault Histoire et Patrimoine 2023

No one could have imagined that there were gardens of this quality here in central Brittany, near our home. It's absolutely miraculous. It's a rescue, I wouldn't say unique, but almost. It's really a spearhead, a locomotive for the territory. The Coscro is a childhood dream. It's a place where I often came to spend my summer holidays. It's a magical place, a mysterious place too, attracting a curiosity, unfortunately transformed into a farm after the Second World War. And the dream being, eventually, one day to be able to acquire it. And that's what happened in 1984 with my wife. The heart attack was materialized by this purchase. And so we decided to embark on this adventurous project hoping to give back to this site all the splendor that could be imagined through the elements that remained. We are here in a country called central Brittany, and more particularly the country of King Morvan, near Gemné-sur-Scorfe, which was the capital of the Rhône-Gemné. And it's a highly affluent region, with a lot of agriculture. And this house, we wanted to restore it, of course, to find all its history through the archives, departmental archives, national archives, which allowed us to go back to the 14th century. And thanks to this history, we started a restoration as close as possible to a historical truth, both at the level of the building, of its interior arrangements, but also of its environment, the closest one, that is, the garden and everything that goes around the garden. So, at first, we went to the emergencies, and the emergency was to save the buildings that remained in place, so to ensure what is called the roof and the roof. So the roof and the roof are the roofs, windows, doors. This is what happened during the first 15 years. And then, we immersed ourselves in the places, and by immersing ourselves in the places, we see and discover things that we had not seen at the beginning, namely the presence of a field, which was actually a garden, and which gradually materialized. And to understand this site a little, of course, we had no more traces from a historical point of view, and we did research in archives, national archives, departmental archives, to find all the traces of what could have been done on this site. And through these archives, it allowed us to understand that in the 17th century, the house, the old manor house, which has a very precise description of 1585, was transformed at the beginning of the 17th century, in this first classical period, into a very fashionable countryside residence. In front of the house, of course, we had an agricultural field, which, from one year to the next, was transforming. Corn field, potato field, beet field. And, of course, the description that we had found in the archives did not correspond at all to this type of thing. And we set up, thanks to the state's services, which, of course, intervened, a specific archaeological research of gardens, with a plural team, under the authority of an archaeologist, whose name is Annie Manverdillon, and who allowed us to find the whole garden system. This is a work that was carried out between 2002 and 2003. And thanks to this work, it allowed us to restore the garden that had been positioned here around the years 1625-1635. And thanks to that, we saw all the traces reappear on the entire garden, the false plantations, the alleys, the back alleys, the squares, everything reappeared on the ground. And we have repositioned ourselves today, exactly a centimeter close to what had been done at the time. We are quite sensitive and honored to have been selected by the jury of the Grand Trophée d'Asseau du Patrimoine, who selected us in this year 2023, regarding the restoration that we have put in place for about forty years now.