Dusk is settling over Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and little puffs of red dust are flying into the jasmine-scented air as acclaimed dancers Boris Charmatz and Johanna Lenke move fluidly around the clay tennis court at La Pausa, the idyllic villa Gabrielle Chanel had designed according to her exacting specifications in 1929. It’s hard to know what her paramour the Duke of Westminster would have made of the cinematic—and supremely physical—duet that unfolded in front of a crowd of artists, curators, collectors, and patrons on Friday evening, but he doubtless observed some more traditional athletic confrontations during his summers spent with Chanel on the French Riviera.
The designer made her clifftop retreat La Pausa (meaning “the pause”), a haven for artists and intellectuals in the 1930s and ’40s, inviting the likes of Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy and Luchino Visconti to while away summer evenings among the ancient olive trees and beds of fragrant lavender sloping gently towards the Bay of Monaco. “After dinner,” reads a Vogue report of a night at La Pausa in the late 1930s, “the rugs are suddenly rolled up… Salvador Dalí amuses himself with a large borrowed black hat, mimicking a character from the Inquisition. The Duchess of Gramont, draped in brocade, jingles her Indian jewels, while painter Christian Bérard sports an Easter egg on top of his head, and Coco ties wide whimsical ribbons in her hair.”
Coco Chanel eventually sold La Pausa in 1953—although not before Dalí had painted his “The Endless Enigma” on the grounds—but the fashion house she founded acquired it a decade ago in 2015. Now, following a painstaking renovation by architect Peter Marino (who personally nurtured two cactus plants to ensure they reached as tall as those that originally stood sentinel at the foot of the villa’s stone staircase), the house looks exactly as it did when Chanel and her circle of high society friends gathered around the piano at nightfall to hear Misia Sert play.
“When I spoke to Peter Marino of his extraordinary five-year renovation, he said that he had meticulously worked to make it feel like Gabrielle Chanel had just left this house,” Yana Peel, president of Chanel Arts, Culture Heritage, told guests including British filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien, South Korean artist Ayoung Kim, and Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the dinner that followed the dancing on La Pausa’s opening night. “And being here in this magnificent setting, it is not very hard to imagine the Roaring Twenties—les Années Folles—in this space where Salvador Dalí painted 11 paintings, where Misia Sert played the piano all night as the Ballets Russes danced.”
Indeed, Marino pored over hundreds of archive photographs in order to restore Chanel’s beloved second home to its former glory, from the piano in the living room (where Grammy-nominated singer Alice Smith performed for guests on Friday night) to the books that line the intimate library, the mirrored walls in Coco’s magnificent bathroom, to the bronze Giacometti lamp that sits beside her bed.
While the property—with its calming sea views, graceful stone staircase and cloister garden—is undeniably spectacular, the decor (with the notable exception of that decadent bathroom) is simple—almost austere, likely inspired by the clean lines and hushed atmosphere of Aubazine Abbey in Corrèze, where the designer spent much of her childhood following the death of her parents, and which was so key to the aesthetic she would later establish at Chanel.
In her speech to guests, Peel noted that she was initially surprised to discover that Gabrielle Chanel did not decorate the walls of La Pausa with artworks, but realized that, “for her home, she collected artists. And she gave them the ultimate luxury, which is freedom, time, and space.” Chanel Arts Culture Heritage is reopening La Pausa, which will remain a private residence but serve as a “seat of creativity, culture and hospitality”, with the ambition of extending that tradition, she said. “The volatility in our world brings us back to the sources of joy that remain everlasting,” said Peel. “Friendship, art, nature, and truly the primacy of human creativity.”
