Inside Coco Chanel’s newly renovated Riviera escape villa La Pausa
Everyone from Salvador Dalí to the Duke of Westminster has stayed at the Cote D’Azur gem, which Chanel has bought back and restored to its former glory.
The year is 1938 and Salvador Dalí is in full artistic flow, painting on the balcony of the west wing of Coco Chanel’s villa La Pausa, where the shadow-eliminating north light is best. In the evening, he rolls back the salon rugs and beckons guests to dance while the renowned pianist Misia Sert plays, before retiring to the guesthouse with his wife, Gala. In total Dalí completed 11 paintings at La Pausa, one time staying at the villa for four months.
“The vibe was chilled, guests could do as they pleased,” says Yana Peel, Chanel’s president of arts, culture and heritage. For the likes of Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky, there were no schedules; Chanel herself rarely emerged until 1pm and there was no dress code – the designer found comfort in stripy tops, wool pants and cork-soled espadrilles. Meals were served buffet style (platters of pasta, French potatoes and roast beef) and staff appeared frequently to replenish Champagne and pour fine wine. There were Easter parties, masked balls and tennis tournaments, views of a glittering Mediterranean Sea under an enormous sky.
Chanel bought the five-acre plot of land in the Cote d’Azur township of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in 1928, enlisting the architect Robert Streitz, a 27-year-old wunderkind who had started to make his name in the local area. But the style of La Pausa was entirely her own, a contrast to the Art Deco and Modernist villas popping up on the cliffs at the time – Eileen Gray’s famed E-1027 house is just down the road. In the entranceway more than 20,000 bricks were used to create a Romanesque vaulted ceiling. Through to the hall and the ceilings soar to eight metres, not unlike the nave of a church. Light floods in from five windows, a nod to Chanel’s juggernaut Nº 5 fragrance.
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“This was the one house that embodies her vision,” Peel says. Outside are rows upon rows of lavender bushes and hundreds of ancient olive trees, none of which were touched in the building of the house.
Streitz proposed two wings reached via two staircases, but Chanel insisted on a single stone version, austere but grand, identical to the one at Aubazine Abbey, the convent she lived in from age 11 to 17, after her mother died. The architect was dispatched to Corrèze to pore over every inch of the abbey’s staircase, its dimensions, materials (stone and plaster) and majesty. The wings remained, with Chanel and her longtime lover the Duke of Westminster on the west side, and rooms for guests and staff on the east. Her front suite was wardrobe-less, with a balcony overlooking the Rock of Monaco and the shimmering port of Monte-Carlo. A gold star was tacked to her gilded wrought-iron headboard and above the fireplace hung a giant Baroque mirror.
Between the end of World War II and the duke’s death in 1953, Chanel’s enthusiasm for La Pausa waned. That year she sold the villa and all its contents to the Hungarian-born publisher and literary agent Emery Reves and his American wife, Wendy. Reves died in 1981, but his widow continued to live there until her death in 2007. The property and all its contents were left to the Dallas Museum of Art. It wasn’t until 2015 that the house of Chanel was able to buy it back, sum undisclosed.
And so began the Herculean task of restoring La Pausa to its interwar glory. Apart from updating the heating and plumbing and adding air conditioning (a remote is hidden in a quilted leather box), architect Peter Marino – a longtime collaborator of the fashion house – wanted the villa to feel “like walking through a gate in time … as though Mademoiselle Chanel had left the room only five minutes earlier”. Sepia photographs of the house in the 1930s were analysed in their thousands, architectural blueprints examined. Pieces were bought back at auction or reproduced with unfaltering reverence, everything from original bagatelle (wooden pinball) boards to the terracotta-potted crimson geraniums.
This year La Pausa will reopen as a centre of culture. Its first event is a residency for four writers who will be, just as Chanel’s guests were, free to revel, roam and create. “It’s women writers progressing women’s stories,” Peel explains, stressing that there are no expectations for output. “The best I could do is put those people together and create the conditions to give them freedom, which is, I think, the greatest luxury.”
The authors’ names are yet to be revealed but the texts in the original oak bookcase suggest the kind of literature the house celebrates. On one side are works from the interwar era, many written by Chanel’s friends, while the other houses modern works. “It’s what we imagine she would have been reading,” Peel says. There’s Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, a Rupert Everett, a Cormac McCarthy and three Rachel Cusks.
Artists, gallerists, musicians and dancers will gather here at the close of Art Basel for an intimate dinner (there’s talk of a Boris Charmatz choreography on the clay tennis court). Meanwhile, an Italian philosopher and an Oscar-winning actress – “When you find out who you’ll say, ‘Wow, I couldn’t imagine that pairing’,” Peel says – have just recorded a podcast series at La Pausa. There are plans to bottle olive oil.
Coco Chanel never sought to influence or acquire the work of her friends. Instead, she simply wanted to admire it and to offer an extraordinary environment in which to create it, which is exactly the same spirit Peel is committed to at La Pausa today.
This story is from the August issue of WISH.
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