One day, they saw the house, rising out of a field of long grass and surrounded by a state forest.
But when Angela Watson saw the flood water outside her house rising rapidly, there was one item particularly worth salvaging for her – her precious Carlisle United season tickets.
One afternoon in 1994, the story goes, he was riding his motorbike through this part of rural Provence and spotted the 17th-century bastide (country house) "rising up out of the fields of lavender and olive trees".
There, among stark black and white photographs, was a perspective drawing of the house rising from the ground as if it had grown organically on its wooded lot, something like an updated version of Thoreau's shack at Walden Pond.
Fixing the house of the rising damp Fallingwater may be an icon of 20th architecture, but the leaks were apparently so bad that the client nicknamed the house Rising Mildew.
FOR much of the past decade, a forlorn house, rising from the rubble just off Interstate 95 here, has served passers-by as an education of sorts in the life and contributions of James Henry O'Rourke.
