"On the last day in her kitchen at La Peetch, she prepared bœuf en daube à la provençale and thought of new beginnings. She was 80."

Julia Child had a knack for wonderful homes: be it her charmed upbringing in Pasadena or in the Edenic beauty of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she served as an intelligence officer in World War II; in Sichuan Province; Bonn; Oslo or Cambridge. And, of course, there’s her beloved apartment in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris that she stuffed to the gills with pots and pans, and where she first began work on the book that made her an American icon.

But she loved no place so well as La Pitchoune (or “La Peetch” as she preferred it), the modest stucco house that she and her husband, Paul, built in Provence, France. La Peetch was the apotheosis of Child’s love for France. She called it her “spiritual home” and for nearly three decades would retreat there to decompress, edit her work...