Our history



Agnès and François, son of the soil whose farmers grandparents also held the same place (café RABEYRIN) well appreciated by the villagers and the visitors of the castle, immortalize since 2007 through their 2 guest rooms a 80-year-old family tradition of welcome (Photo) These guest rooms are for Agnès and François a real life plan today. Both prefer to consider their rooms as a mean to communicate and share their passions rather than a commercial activity.
If François, Sales manager of a british unit, changes his suit in the evening and on weekends to be transformed into a gentleman-farmer, Agnès, as for her, left her job of HR Program manager Europe within an international group to dedicate herself into local voluntary missions and to this tourist activity as well as to elaborate gastronomic recipes.

We acquired this building in May, 1996. It was then about a farm belonging to a local farmer, this one by having inheriting in the 1930s during the dismantling of the Domain of Maubourg. Indeed until this date, this farm, as the other farms of the hamlet of MAUBOURG, was part of the same tenement. When we bought this building, it was not by chance … La Désirade, which was not named that way back then, was the neighbour of François big father, Alphonse Rabeyrin, which had already been acquired itself by the previous generation.


La Désirade :
First of all,  what is our current house, was between 1930 and 1996 a vast farm building, that has been reconstructed, enlarged, modified on multiple occasions (show it the visible stony chaining on facades). Without being completely sure of it, this farm establishes the historic bases of the castle (as indicate it the outside ledges, the hall of the nearby building dated on 1760, and a girder of door 1621).
The living house of the farm of origin, today rented, was very summary: 2 rooms downstairs, serving as kitchen with a huge fireplace as well as a salting tub for sausages and a bedroom on the first floor. No conveniences and a single water source in the kitchen, this one communicating directly with the cowshed to allow to transfer the heat of animals in the accommodation of the farmer.
The first works realized from 1996 were done by François and concerned the housing part of the farmer. This one is today rented all year. Afterward, we undertook the works concerning the rehabilitation of the barn between 2000 and 2001 and, although everything was realized by local craftsmen, we imagined the plans, chose materials…

The most impressive building is today fitted out in living rooms but formerly served to shelter the only and real wealth of the exploitation: animals gathered in the cowshed (named in this region stable) whereas the feed was stored on the first floor of the barn. There, where you now can lay in an armchair in the corner of the wood stove, formerly rested cows!

In 2003, while we lived in Lyon, we decided to leave the city to settle definitively in MAUBOURG in our renamed "farm" La Désirade. Due to our story, our passions, our implication into local life, we will know how to explain (in French for some but also in English for our foreign friends), why of Salt meats specialties here in Saint Maurice de Lignon, the local traditions, architecture, the old forgotten jobs, the history of the castle of Maubourg which we redrew with some friends in the Book " if Maubourg was told me ", we shall speak to you about gatherings of Hot-air balloons or days " the Happiness is in the meadow " that we participate to organize every year. We shall try hard to direct your visits according to your expectations and tastes.