In her book Fame and Frame, the celebrity photographer Pat York includes a shot of actor Jack Nicholson walking away from a modest Proven?al cottage, on the chimney of which stands a peacock. The picture was taken, she wrote, at a property “near the village of La Garde-Freinet, owned by the director Tony Richardson. We had been invited to join other guests – Buck Henry, Anjelica Huston, David Hockney [who painted the swimming pool] and John Gielgud”. The peacock, she said, symbolised “the otherworldly quality of time and place ... at this escapist’s paradise.”

That paradise is now available to rent. In the foothills of the Massif des Maures, 21km from St Tropez, the hamlet was deserted by the time Richardson happened upon it in the 1960s but gradually he began to do up its rustic dwellings. There are now half a dozen: a main house with four bedrooms, three smaller houses and two annexes, one containing an office and laundry, the other a gym. Combined, they sleep 20 and the whole place is available through Petersham Properties.

Founded last year, the company has a small portfolio of alluring properties. Among them, further inland, 90 minutes’ drive from Avignon, is another once-abandoned settlement. Le Grand Banc was rescued by a scion of the Fry chocolate dynasty, the engineer and philanthropist Jeremy Fry. Perched 792m up in the Lubéron hills, the 400-acre estate has 20 or so buildings clustered around a single cobbled street. It sleeps up to 24, across eight houses, some of them self-contained studios, others with two or three bedrooms.