OFFERGet to know your hostess
During your stay, Marie-Pierre will be your hostess. Until we get to know her better, find out how and why she chose to welcome you to the Moulin de Salazar. Although the Moulin de Salazar has only recently reopened, the events that led her to welcome you here today go back many years.
The love of beauty and the dream of a castle...
" One day I will have a castle!" This sentence, Marie-Pierre was still a child when she uttered it, but she pronounced it with such a surprising conviction that her parents never forgot it... Yet, it is indeed to her family circle that Marie-Pierre owes this inspiration and more particularly to the women who passed on to her mother, the only child of a whole family, the love of beauty, of wood, of linen, of hospitality and of butter cooking... All of them are working in the craft industry: a cabinetmaker grandfather and another upholsterer having transmitted to them the passion and tradition of antique furniture and fabrics. At the end of the First World War, a great-aunt worked as a tailor for men; her sister, as a small hand for the big Parisian fashion houses. At home we talk about flou, embroidery, hats: her grandmother was a milliner in the 30s! But her major source of inspiration remains this great-aunt married to a screw-cutting industrialist in Saint-Florent-sur-Cher, and whose house dating from the 1930s opens onto an entrance paved with red, black and white cement tiles, and offers the incredible luxury of a real bathroom with a bathtub with lion's paws... Thus, Marie-Pierre nourishes from childhood her taste for aesthetics and her dreams of a castle!
An (unexpected) return to the land of his childhood...
Can we really speak of chance? In 2018, when Marie-Pierre, a Toulouse native at heart, began her search for the castle of her dreams, she did not focus on any particular region and scanned the area around Toulouse over a radius of one hundred kilometers. It is thus the chance which leads her to the Moulin de SalazarIt took her some time to realize that the building was located only fifteen kilometers from the village of Castelsagrat, the village where her paternal grandparents and grandmother Octavie's house was located, and with whom Marie-Pierre had fond memories of her childhood and adolescence... Such a coincidence could only make sense: Although it is not a castle per se, Marie-Pierre, under the spell of this unique and magical place, adopted the Moulin de Salazar at first sight and definitely: it was love at first sight! Since then, she thanks chance every day for this inspiring and unexpected return to her roots!
A true passion for architecture and interior design...
Initiated in childhood, Marie-Pierre's passion for beauty naturally led her to the field of architecture and design. An interest that will never cease to develop, to the point of pushing her to follow a double curriculum: enrolled in a business school, she enrolls in parallel (and secretly) at the University of Art History... An initiative that will earn her some reprimands, which will not defeat her aspirations: as soon as she obtains her business degree, she flies to Canada and enrolls in a school of interior architecture and design in Vancouver. She began working as an interior designer upon her return to France in the early 2000s. Today, she realizes that each of the projects she has worked on over the past twenty years has contributed to the great renovation project of the Moulin de Salazar...
And above all, the desire to make his guests happy!
If Marie-Pierre has invested so much time and effort in transforming the Moulin de Salazar into exceptional guest roomsIt is above all to share her love of beauty and goodness, but also because she is convinced that such testimonies of our industrial heritage must be cherished and preserved. From the structural work to the smallest decorative element, including the choice of materials and fabrics, no detail has escaped her: everything has been thought out for the pleasure and satisfaction of her guests. A principle that naturally extends to the arts of the table: tea service, plates and cutlery are chosen with care... and the dishes served must be up to the task!
Thus, to satisfy her guests, Marie-Pierre cooks only fresh and local products and offers dishes that are sometimes traditional, sometimes original, but always inspired by the multiple influences of her childhood. On her father's side, the cuisine of the South-West, which always evokes for her the great family reunions by the fire and the generosity of her grandmother welcoming her grandchildren with foie gras and confits, sugar-coated marvels and chicken in a pot... On her mother's side, the cuisine of the Center, more marked by the working class culture, potato patés, veal blanquettes and buttered brioches on Sundays... Without forgetting the tasty cuisine of the Mediterranean region where Marie-Pierre lived for part of her youth... So many inspirations for a single watchword: to please and make her guests happy!