Inside Coco Chanel’s Renovated Villa La Pausa on the French Riviera

ROQUEBRUNE-CAP-MARTIN, France — In the 1930s, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s hillside villa on the French Riviera was a magnet for creators like painter Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luchino Visconti and writer Colette. After a multiyear restoration, Chanel is reopening the villa next month with the aim of hosting artists once again.

Architect Peter Marino, who has collaborated with the French luxury brand for more than three decades, pored over hundreds of archival photographs to recreate the original interiors of La Pausa, the legendary designer’s home — complete with a mirrored bathroom that echoes the Art Deco staircase of her couture salon in Paris.

But that’s the only reminder of the glitz and glamour of her fashion empire. Chanel, who built the house from scratch, envisioned it as a peaceful retreat. She enjoyed nothing more than to jump on the Train Bleu in Paris at midnight and arrive in Monte-Carlo by dinner time.

On a recent visit to the house, set in an olive grove with spectacular views stretching from Monaco to the Italian Riviera, the only sound was birdsong. Sitting on the wisteria-covered patio surrounded by lavender, jasmine and magnolias, it was easy to see what prompted Chanel to buy the property, which encompasses a chapel, guesthouse and tennis court.  

Next month, the villa will welcome a clutch of art world luminaries after the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland, before hosting its first official writers’ retreat next November.

“Gabrielle Chanel had a clear vision that La Pausa should be a place for ‘pause,’ a home of one’s own in which to convene artists and thinkers. For a roaring decade after its construction in 1928, La Pausa offered just that — a tranquil yet stimulating environment, free from the distractions and constraints of everyday life,” said Yana Peel, president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel.

“At La Pausa, we will again ignite new ideas that might not otherwise have the freedom, resources or space to flourish, as an extension of the patronage and elevated hospitality that Mademoiselle Chanel offered in the villa’s heyday,” she said in a statement.

A philanthropist and former chief executive officer of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Peel leads the Chanel Culture Fund, which supports artists, and works with curators, museums and institutions on long-term projects. La Pausa is one of several heritage sites under its umbrella.

In addition to Chanel’s apartment at 31 Rue Cambon, renovated in 2020 by decorator Jacques Grange, the house is supporting restoration work at the Aubazine Abbey, the austere 12th-century Cistercian convent-orphanage where she spent her teenage years, forging her taste for minimalist design.

Chanel, who frequently toured the Mediterranean aboard the Flying Cloud — the yacht owned by her lover, the Duke of Westminster — bought La Pausa in 1928 for 1.8 million francs, a princely sum at the time, said Hélène Fulgence, head of heritage sites at Chanel.

“She was 43 years old and at the height of her fame, and she had never taken a break. She was always thinking about the next store, the next idea, the next factory, the next fragrance,” Fulgence said as she guided a handful of visitors through the property.

A Golden Moment

In lieu of the pink and green bungalow originally built by British novelists Alice and Charles Norris Williamson in the 1910s, she commissioned a young Belgian-born architect, Robert Streitz, to construct the house of her dreams. Chanel stipulated that none of the trees should be uprooted, including the olive tree right in the middle of the path leading to the front door.

A fan of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, Streitz designed the house around a cloister-like patio, with a 26-foot-high entrance hall with five rectangular windows overlooking a twin staircase. Chanel nixed the staircase plan, asking him instead to create a single set of steps, an almost exact replica of the monks’ staircase at Aubazine.

Bare at first, the lobby was gradually furnished with Spanish and Rococo furniture in the same vein as the carved wooden doors.

The living room, dominated by two mauve velvet couches, hosted lively gatherings where Misia Sert played the piano and guests like Dalí, illustrator Christian Bérard and gallerist Pierre Colle would roll up the Persian rug and dance in improvised costumes.

“We think that Christian Dior came here with Pierre Colle because they ran a gallery together, and Pierre Colle was a frequent guest at La Pausa,” Fulgence said.

Without a doubt, the most poignant room is Chanel’s bedroom, which has a balcony facing the sea.

Its furniture had been put into storage when the house was sold in 1953 to Emery and Wendy Reves, an American couple with a sizable collection of Impressionist masterpieces. Wendy Reves, who lived there until her death in 2007, had the bedroom completely remodeled, though the rest of the house was left largely intact.

The house was put on the market in 2013 for 40 million euros, but its contents were bequeathed to the Dallas Museum of Art. Chanel acquired the house in 2015 for an undisclosed sum, and Fulgence was able to buy back furniture and homewares at an auction in Paris in 2019, including Chanel’s gilded wrought iron headboard.

Tucked into the frame are a gold star and a palm frond, exactly as pictured on an old photograph of Chanel receiving visitors in bed. Marino had her ivory quilted bedspread reproduced, but the room’s Baroque mirrors, bedside lamp and Louis XIII chair are all original.

“I hoped the restoration would recall the time in which the house was built, as though Mademoiselle Chanel had left the room only five minutes before. Authenticity and the history of La Pausa were paramount,” Marino said.

He details the process in “La Pausa: The Ideal Mediterranean Villa of Gabrielle Chanel,” a 350-page coffee table book to be published by Flammarion in French and English in September. Illustrated with 500 exclusive photographs and unpublished archival documents, it captures a golden moment in time between the wars.

A Haven for Artists

Mornings were quiet, as Chanel never emerged from her quarters before 1 p.m. In her 1960 memoir “In My Fashion,” Vogue editor Bettina Ballard recounted a typical day at La Pausa.

“The house was blissfully silent in the morning. If and when you came down, there were small, unostentatious cars with drivers to run you down the mountain to swim or shop in Monte Carlo,” she wrote.

“Lunch was the first moment of the day when the guests met in a group, and no one ever missed lunch — it was far too entertaining. The long dining room had a buffet at one end with hot Italian pasta, cold English roast beef, French dishes, a little of everything,” she said.

“No one bothered to listen to anything that didn’t have a modicum of wit to it. Chanel, who ate little, stood most of the time during lunch before the great fireplace, as usual, one hand plunged in a pocket, the other gesticulating, her broad mouth opening even broader in a grin as she remembered and recounted wicked or touching or funny anecdotes from her own or her friends’ pasts,” Ballard said.

Afternoons were dedicated to walks, tennis or napping in the hammocks suspended between the olive trees.

“We went down the hill from Roquebrune very seldom at night, and when we did it was a little like an invading hostile army making a sortie against a rival camp. Chanel thrived on feuds and always had one simmering with the Honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes or Princesse Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, both wielders of strong social axes,” Ballard recounted.

Chanel’s circle formed their own clique, distinct from that of Gerald and Sara Murphy in Antibes, who entertained Pablo Picasso, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Cole Porter, or Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles in Hyères, who ran with a Surrealist crowd.

Having fled Spain because of the Civil War, Dalí settled at the villa from September to December 1938, completing 11 major paintings that were exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City the following year, paving the ground for his move to the U.S.

He and his wife Gala slept in the little guesthouse next to the chapel. Having fully updated the house’s 100-year-old plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems, Marino has also added showers to the guest bedrooms in preparation for a fresh crop of visitors.

Resident chef Arquimedes Jesus Rodriguez, who trained with Mauro Colagreco at the three-Michelin star restaurant Mirazur in nearby Menton, creates dishes based on locally sourced ingredients.

In addition to the four nonfiction writers expected this fall, the villa will host other artist residencies. “The idea is to make this villa a place to generate ideas and exchange points of view, so that artists in Chanel’s entourage can draw inspiration from it,” Fulgence said.

The location should also fuel the imagination of the house’s creative teams.

“Our image departments and our creative studio directors have an open invitation to come to La Pausa as often as they want for whatever they want. And then there are the friends of the house, clients but also celebrities who are in Cannes and who will drop by La Pausa,” she added.

Still, staying overnight will remain a rare privilege. “Sleeping in Gabrielle Chanel’s bed is very, very special,” Fulgence said. “This is not a hotel. It’s really a private home.”