In this story · 7 sections
Every coast has its houses, but few have been as thoroughly mythologised as the villas of the French Riviera. They have served as settings for novels, as stages for film, as salons for writers and politicians and, once, as a recording studio. Most remain private homes. Their stories, though, are public property – and the best way to read the coast is through them.
01Villa America and Tender Is the Night
The modern Riviera summer has a plausible birthplace: Cap d'Antibes in the early 1920s. Gerald and Sara Murphy, wealthy Americans, came to the coast in 1922 at the invitation of Cole Porter and settled in 1923, first persuading the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc to stay open through the summer and later buying a villa on the cape that they named Villa America. Their picnics and days on the beach at La Garoupe helped make sunbathing fashionable.
F. Scott Fitzgerald began a Riviera novel in 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published, and it appeared in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Its glamorous expatriates owe much to the Murphys – in early drafts the couple were called Seth and Dinah Piper, before becoming Dick and Nicole Diver – and the opening chapters, with young Rosemary Hoyt arriving on the Riviera and falling under the Divers' spell, remain among the most evocative pages written about the coast. The story also mirrors the Fitzgeralds' own troubles, which is why the glamour curdles. For the hotel today, see our news piece on the Hôtel du Cap.
02La Mauresque, Cap Ferrat: Maugham's salon
In 1927 Somerset Maugham bought a Moorish-style villa on Cap Ferrat, built around 1900 for a former chaplain to King Leopold II of the Belgians, and had it remodelled by Henri Delmotte, Marcel Guilgot and the young American architect Barry Dierks, who stripped away its neo-oriental decoration. It was Maugham's main residence until his death in 1965, and it became a near-obligatory stop for Riviera society: Winston Churchill, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Aga Khan, and writers including T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Ian Fleming, Noël Coward and Virginia Woolf.
03Bonjour Tristesse: the summer villa as a stage
Françoise Sagan was 18 when Bonjour Tristesse was published in 1954, and it was an overnight sensation. Its narrator, seventeen-year-old Cécile, spends a summer in a villa on the Riviera with her charming, amoral father and his mistress, and the villa – with the young man in the house next door – is the closed world in which the drama unfolds. Otto Preminger filmed it in English in 1958.
04To Catch a Thief: Hitchcock's hilltop villa
Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955), his first film in the VistaVision widescreen process, made the Riviera a dream of the 1950s. Cary Grant plays John Robie, a retired cat burglar living in a hilltop villa, and Grace Kelly an heiress holidaying with her mother. The film was shot largely at Paramount in Hollywood, but the location work took in Cannes, Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Saint-Jeannet and Tourrettes-sur-Loup. It was the last of Kelly's three films for Hitchcock; Edith Head designed her gold lamé gown for the costume ball.
05La Piscine: the pool near Saint-Tropez
If one film captures the Riviera villa as an object of desire, it is Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1969). Alain Delon and Romy Schneider play a couple holidaying at a friend's villa near Saint-Tropez; Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin arrive and the summer turns dangerous. The swimming pool of the title frames the first scene and the last. Unusually for the time, the cast also filmed in English for the international release, rather than being dubbed.
06Nellcôte: a villa that made a record
Villa Nellcôte is a sixteen-room Belle Époque mansion on a headland at Villefranche-sur-Mer, built in the late 1890s by a former banker and fronted with marble Ionic columns. From April to October 1971 it was leased by Keith Richards, and recording sessions for the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. took place in its basement. Richards left France in late August that year. The album, released in 1972, was critically acclaimed. Nellcôte, like La Mauresque and Villa America, remains a private home.
At a glance
| Work | Year | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald) | 1934 | The Riviera; expatriates modelled on the Murphys |
| Bonjour Tristesse (Sagan) | 1954; film 1958 | A summer villa on the Riviera |
| To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock) | 1955 | Cannes, Nice, Villefranche and hill villages |
| La Piscine (Deray) | 1969 | A villa near Saint-Tropez |
| Exile on Main St. (Rolling Stones) | sessions 1971 | Villa Nellcôte, Villefranche-sur-Mer |
07Reading the coast
These houses are private, and should be left so. But the landscapes are open to all: the beach at La Garoupe, Villefranche's harbour, the hill villages Hitchcock filmed. Pack the books, watch the films before you go, and the coast will look different. Our Riviera city guides on verapi.fr and our guide to Antibes after summer are a good place to start; more in our culture section.
