Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

Villa Oustau, located in Aureilhan in the Hautes-Pyrénées, was built between 1910 and the first quarter of the 20th century by architect Paul-Louis-Joseph Gély for engineer Laurence Oustau. The latter, which had been based in Tarbes since 1873, ran a tile factory and an award-winning ceramic factory at the Universal Exhibition of 1889. The villa, decorated with Art Nouveau ceramic decorations designed by Lucien Gros, reflects the excellence of local productions.

The 18 000 m2 park, which is structured as a leisure garden, orchard and vegetable garden, was built in parallel with the construction. In 1910, Laurence Oustau acquired a land that had already been treed, where trees planted around 1890, like a sink in America, remained. Water, captured from a nearby canal, supplied three reservoirs for watering, while a decorative wood cement well decorated the entrance.

The horticulturalist Gabriel Carassus, involved as early as 1911, completed the plantations with fruit trees and ornamental species (dairy, oak, maple). Family archives reveal invoices for flowers (dahlias, geraniums) and implantation sketches dated 1912. The garden, dense until the 1930s, lost its identity after its acquisition by the commune, with the disappearance of the orchard and vegetable garden.

The villa, classified as a Historic Monument in 1994, retains original elements such as the ironwork grill or centuries-old trees (Portuguese bay, plane trees). However, subsequent changes, such as the addition of an auditorium in the basement, have altered the initial perception of the building and its landscape environment.

Today, the garden, open to the public via avenue Jean Jaurès, has a partially preserved but impoverished route. The views of the Pyrenees, once visible from the terraces, are now blocked by the vegetation and the surrounding buildings. The villa thus illustrates the evolution of heritage spaces between preservation and contemporary adaptations.

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