bastide

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from French bastide, from Occitan.

1. A mansion in Provence.

   “This gorgeous, well-restored eighteenth-century bastide is close to perfection. Nathalie runs the house as a brilliant mix of home and guest-wing.”

2. A new town built in medieval Languedoc, Gascony, and Aquitaine during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

   “Special circumstances or special men have called it into brief activity. The ‘bastides’ and the ‘villes neuves’ of thirteenth-century France were founded at a particular period and under special circumstances, and, brief as the period was and governed by military urgencies, they were laid out on a more or less definite plan (p. 143).”