The Room Above the Inn

December 31, 2025

The Room Above the Inn:

A Visit to Van Gogh's Last Home in Auvers sur Oise

As a great fan of the painter, from whom I am increasingly influenced in my own artwork, I am excited to share a particularly fascinating experience I had in the past month with you.

No more than an hour from Paris, a short trip, one that begins in the most beautiful and romantic city in the world and ends in a place where time slows down. Auvers sur Oise welcomes me with green surrounded silence, the Seine River flowing comfortably, low houses, streets that feel almost like a setting for a painting. It is hard to believe that here in this pastoral village, one of the most tormented and turbulent artists in art history’s life ended.

The visit to the Auberge Ravoux and the room where Vincent van Gogh lived was no ordinary visit. It was a private, intimate tour, the kind where you feel like someone has opened not just a door to you, but their heart.

On the ground floor there is a simple café with wooden tables that awakens an imaginary scent of home-cooked French food. Everything is modest, restrained, as if the place itself does not want to be disturbed of the memory of the past. From there, up a narrow old staircase, we went up to the room above the inn.

This is where Vincent van Gogh lived in the last weeks of his life.
And where he died.

The room is very small, with bare walls, no objects, and no need for them. Void speaks loudly, absence is the strongest presence. It is hard not to ask how, within such a limited space, Van Gogh created paintings that the entire world continues to observe, to be moved by, and argues about.

But the intensity of the visit was transformed into something unique by the encounter with the owner of the property – C.Dominique , a special man. It is obvious that he is not a “manager of a historical site,” but a gatekeeper of a life story. The encounter with him was very moving, the kind that happens once in a lifetime.

Mr. C.Dominique

Mr. C.Dominique told us his personal story – a story that cannot be made up.
A businessman whose life changed in an instant following a serious car accident.
His car crashed, no less, no more, into the inn, the very same place where Van Gogh spent his final days.. An inconceivable, almost mystical coincidence.
This accident changed the course of Mr.
C.Dominique’s life completely.

From that moment, C.Dominique said, he realized he had a mission. He decided to dedicate his life to commemorating Van Gogh, not as a business project, but as a way of life. Since the 1980’s he purchased the place, and to this day he has invested heavily in renovating the place, which had been abandoned for decades.
He preserves the place, nurtures it, takes care of the small details, the historical truth and the spirit of the place. C.Dominique tells Van Gogh’s story with sensitivity, humility, and a deep sense of responsibility for what was here.

On June 10th 1890, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “Some day or another I belive I will find a way to have my own exhibition in a cafe”.
Since Van Gogh expressed this heartfelt wish, thousands of scientific articles, more than 30,000 books, countless films, documentaries, plays and poems have been produced, but 135 years later his dream was to exhibit in a café – a modest ambition, although important to him, it has not yet been fulfilled. This is the current mission of the Van Gogh Foundation to transform his last room into the smallest museum in the world!

To stand in this little room, and to hear the story from a man whose life has been weaved into the life of Van Gogh. This is in the little room that was rented to the painter who paid the inn owner with paintings. Since his death no one has lived in the room. There is a belief that does allow to live in a place where someone committed suicide This is an additional layer of meaning that has been added to a place that was so charged with energy to begin with.

In the inn – the glasses, the wine, the simple food, the vase he immortalized in his paintings, his chair, the black and white floor, some of which is original, and the famous sign on the outside wall of the inn that still stands today CHAMBRES MEUBLEES.
everything is present. Not museum objects behind glass, but the everyday, mundane, living things. For a moment it seems that Van Gogh just went outside to paint, and that he will be right back.

I stand by the entrance to the inn and think about the pace.
About how in Auvers-sur-Seine Van Gogh painted dozens of paintings in an incredibly short period of time – wheat fields, curvy skies, trees, tree roots.
How a man who struggled so much with his soul saw the world in such intense colors.
How suffering did not extinguish the light, but perhaps actually enhanced it.

Leaving the inn, I visit the local cemetery, where Van Gogh is buried, alongside his brother Theo. Two simple graves, covered in green ivy. Again, the simplicity. Again, the feeling that the world, even when it is cruel, can sometimes be gentle.

This is not a visit that leaves a touristy a check mark feeling. It is an encounter..
An encounter with a prolific artist.
An encounter with a place.
And an encounter with a person who chose to dedicate his life to the memory of another.