With its stately plane trees and dense medieval center surrounded by large 18th-century houses, known as bastides, Pélissanne is a picture-postcard Provençal village. When, in 2013, the municipality voted to construct a new library (the old one having become woefully inadequate for a population now numbering 10,000), they decided to locate it in one of these bastides, a handsome three-story edifice sited between the medieval center and the town hall. Built in the local blond stone, pierre de Rognes, the house came with a sizable garden that the municipality opened as a park when it first bought the property, in 2001. By far the largest in Pélissanne’s historic center, the park has become a much loved public facility, so local apprehension was palpable when it was announced that, in order to create a library of sufficient size, an extension to the bastide would have to be built on part of the garden.