Avignon reopens his Baths Belle Époque

Avignon. The Vaucluse prefecture has just reopened a place nestled in its heart a stone’s throw from the ramparts and which belongs to the intimate memory of its inhabitants: the Bains Pommer. Its history began at the end of the 19th century, when Auguste Claude Pommer built a building specifically designed to accommodate public baths. For almost half a century, they allowed thousands of Avignonnais, rather affluent, to wash in an atmosphere conducive to negotiations of all kinds. Closed in 1972, the building sinks into oblivion, between wild occupations and aborted rehabilitation projects, until its sale to the city by the great-granddaughter of the founder in 2017 for 1.5 million euros. He was classified as historic monuments in 1992.

The catering site lasted three years. He consisted in restoring the facades and the canopy, developing access for people with reduced mobility and upgrading electrical installations. The rehabilitation of the site cost 6.7 million euros funded at 65 % by the city and the rest by the State and the Department.

The architects made the site remain in its juice, which makes all the charm of the (free) visit. The circuit begins with the technical spaces (coal boilers, water pumping …) before leaving in the Belle Epoles style atrium with its large glass roof and its pouf in the middle where customers were waiting for one of the cabins that surround the atrium is released. Upstairs are other cabins as well as access to the private housing of the Pommer family. At the top are still kept the large tanks which served as a cold water reserve as well as the washhouse and the terrace to dry the linen.

The only novelty compared to the installations which seem to have not changed in the space of a hundred years, the intervention of Jean-Michel Othoniel in the form of small pink and golden glass fountains installed in several cabins. The “hygiene museum”, as well as the baths also called itself (non -final appellation), is in the course of the places of the city where the artist’s works are disseminated until January 2026.