Melissa George Brings Cinematic Glamour to a 17th-Century French Manor

FROM A DISTANCE, Visan, France, resembles a Provençal village like any other, charming but unassuming: a crop of pale stone buildings on a hilltop surrounded by vineyards. During the medieval period, however, the region was the seat of powerful dignitaries, including the Dauphin of Viennois, a count whose family owned the village’s now-ruined castle. In 1349, Humbert II — the last dauphin before the title was transferred to the French crown — burdened with debt and without a male heir, ceded his remaining land to the king. Five years earlier, in a similar exchange with the pope, who then led the Catholic church from the nearby city of Avignon, he had offered up Visan. The village became part of the papacy’s wealthy enclave, remaining so until the French Revolution; its historic center is still lined with the commanding houses built for nobles and members of the papal court.

The most stately of these is a five-story, 17th-century mansion overlooking the town’s central fountain. Arranged in a U shape around a small internal courtyard shaded by cypress and lime trees, it has an elegant stone facade with rows of arched windows reaching up toward a thick terra-cotta tile roof. Since 2020, it has been a retreat for a transplant of a different kind: the Australian actress Melissa George, 48, who moved to Paris from New York with her sons Raphael, now 10, and Solal, 8, in 2016. Working with the Peruvian-born, Paris-based interior architect Diego Delgado-Elias, 44, she has restored the building’s splendor, transforming the 6,500-square-foot residence into an elegant but comfortable eight-bedroom home perfectly suited to someone who, as she does, lives to entertain.

EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT ‘the actress’ in the village,” George says of the initial interest in her and her plans for the house. She was widely assumed to be American, in part because of her roles in such U.S. television dramas as “In Treatment” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” But many of her neighbors have since become her friends: In the summer, the village children often cool off in her pool and, most nights, there are wine tastings in someone’s cellar. “We have a little club called Les Perchés, which means ‘the eccentrics,’” she says.