La Maison a Vaisselle Cassée or The Broken Crockery House, is a very special place located in Louviers, France. I took a look at a few pictures and couldn’t help being reminded of the gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel. Of course, you can’t eat this one and there’s no evil witch living there.
This was the home of Robert Vasseur and his wife, who abandoned wallpaper and painstakingly decorated their home with mosaics made from broken crockery, seashells, twinkling china and glass. Born in 1908, Vasseur was a milk transporter and also worked in textiles. His strange passion for mosaic decoration started way back in 1952 when he first got the idea while doing repair work in his kitchen. He embellished an old cement kitchen sink with broken crockery mosaics and never looked back. Starting with that old sink, he expanded his idea to the interior of his house, the backyard, then the garden and later even the dog house. This went on for the next 50 years or so.
In order to keep up with his decorating hobby, Vasseur requested the local garbage man to put aside broken pieces of crockery from the collected trash. After cleaning the pieces thoroughly, they were put to use in his home décor ideas. Neighbors also helped Vasseur and his wife by bringing them empty bottles and broken crockery that they could no longer use. Vasseur died in 2002, but the unique broken crockery house is still being looked after by his son Claude, who likes to work on restoring and developing the creative work of his father. He has even made tours of the house possible to those who are interested in viewing the unique property. The colorful Maison a Vaisselle Cassée has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Louviers, and even all of Normandy.
