“In a world of struggle, of rain, of mud, of grey steel,” the French author and diplomat Paul Morand wrote of the Côte d’Azur in a 1929 article for this magazine, “it is the one region which strives to guard, in a softening air, the secret of doing nothing, and the sweetness of living nobly, that is to say, idly and slowly.”
The year prior, the writer, who had a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer dubbed L’Orangerie, gained a new Riviera neighbor in Gabrielle Chanel. The 45-year-old couturier, who would, ironically, later describe her clientele to Morand as “busy women,” had purchased herself a slice of this Gallic paradise, a 1911 bungalow in the craggy hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin—the top of the regional portmanteau being, Morand wrote, “an old fortified village where red and yellow houses, like pimento trees, are rooted in the rocks, among lemon and orange trees,” and the bottom filled with “silver olive trees, with the last homes of millionaires.”
By Chanel’s arrival, the Riviera was a well-established hotbed of creative idyll, a place where Pablo Picasso rendered the ink heiress Sara Murphy and F. Scott Fitzgerald hunted (unsuccessfully) for Edith Wharton, hoping to discuss his work in progress The Great Gatsby—though it was royalty rather than artistry that had cemented the region’s status as the place to be. The extravagant Excelsior Hotel Regina, which loomed above Nice, was built in the last gasps of the 19th century with 400 bedrooms and 233 baths so that Queen Victoria, who vacationed there for more than a dozen years, might accommodate the large entourage of the Empress of India. In its wake, grand homes—Florentine revivals, Moorish villas, Tudor cottages—popped up in the surrounding towns and communes like the violets and primroses that dotted their hillsides each spring.
Chanel bought the pink bungalow, called La Pausa (“the pause”) by its first owners, the writers Alice Muriel and Charles Norris Williamson, and promptly tore it down. In its stead she hired, for the sole building project of her career, the architect Robert Streitz to create a three-story, 15,000-square-foot manor home with a sober off-white façade and gridded windows and walkways that call to mind her iconic quilted bags. But she did keep an enormous olive tree sprawling at the entrance—and the name.
La Pausa: The Ideal Mediterranean Villa of Gabrielle Chanel captures the story of the house and its environs. Its publication, overseen by Yana Peel, Chanel’s president of arts, culture, and heritage, corresponds with the completion of a five-year restoration of the house, helmed by longtime Chanel architect Peter Marino. Published by Flammarion and printed in Verona, it’s book as objet d’art, with a cloth cover the kind of cobalt blue found a hundred yards off the Mediterranean coast or splashed on a cathedral ceiling, and endpapers precision-matched to La Pausa’s shutters. This shade, like a cloudless sky in midsummer, at once natural and electric and over which Marino agonized, is so custom that Pantone doesn’t recognize it. Between these blues nestle more than 500 photographs and collected ephemera: Deco posters advertising the Riviera’s soigné pleasures, sketches of Chanel made by friends and lovers, major artistic works by members of her social set, her architect’s bills from a garden center in Menton and a landscape designer in Nice, a loose-leaf reproduction of the house blueprint. Peel tells me that she spent a year thinking about the colors that would best capture what she calls “the sense of the South of France,” drawing from a limited palette of whites and greens and dusty purple, pulled from the house’s tones, and the region’s natural fauna and fields of lavender.
Chanel was nothing if not enigmatic, but the house—a highly personal project that teemed with life under her stewardship—offers an intimate glimpse of the self-made artisan who revolutionized the way women dress. Her primary inspiration, for instance: the Cistercian abbey of Aubazine, in the forested Corrèze region, where she had lived as a child after her mother’s death and father’s abandonment. “Much later, instead of describing those sterile times,” writes Hélène Fulgence, Chanel’s head of heritage sites, “she would reweave the truth into an ever-shifting legend.” When it came time to build her own home, she wove her memories of the abbey into Streitz’s architectural plans, describing Aubazine’s enormous staircase, worn down by the monks’ footsteps. The resulting home, as Marino said to Peel in a conversation that introduces the book, “couldn’t look more like a convent if you stood on your head and spit nickels!”
