Inside Coco Chanel’s avant-garde Riviera villa

The terrain required solid foundations. “Mademoiselle knew what she wanted,” reported Edgar Maggiore, chief builder of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s Riviera villa, La Pausa, with a revealing sigh. 

“We proved to her that the site she had chosen was not the ideal one. It was solid rock with spots of clay. It was dangerously out of plumb. She refused to listen to our objections, and we were obliged to build extraordinary foundations. Think of it, underneath the house there are supporting beams whose cross-section measures one yard!” 

Along with the foundations, the architect devised an underground stone wall to protect the house from shifting terrain as well as seeping water and humidity. The interior volumes differ from those usually found in buildings of the day. By using concrete vaulting, recently developed in Italy, La Pausa Architect Robert Streitz increased the span of the ceilings, raising the height and extending the size of the rooms.

A cross-shaped design

The plan of the villa forms a large cross. The east and west wings flank a hall that is basilical in design (nearly twenty-five feet, or seven and a half metres, high) and a cloister. The basic unit of the cloister colonnade is the square, which determines the width between columns. The villa is surrounded by three terraces – east, south, and west – made of paving stones laid on the grass. 

The entrance is to the rear, through a vestibule with a rib-vaulted ceiling. Like a porch, it leads via a double door of carved wood to the spectacular whitewashed hall, lit from overhead by two rows of five windows framed in black wrought iron. The hall’s three arches allow a glimpse of the mown grass in the cloister, with the dense greenery of the garden visible through the southern arches beyond. 

The cloister, which projects slightly beyond the two side wings, gives the south façade a certain rhythm and a modern profile, which is accentuated by the difference in height between the east and west wings. 

The outer, load-bearing walls and stone cross-walls produce a rectangular plan traversed on the upper floor by a central east–west passage nearly 50 feet (15 metres) long. 

The mistress of the house occupied the west wing. Its living spaces were devoted to music, reading, and conversation, and Mademoiselle Chanel’s front-facing bedroom upstairs overlooked the sea. The duke’s bedroom overlooked the garden to the rear. The east wing was reserved for guests, dining, and entertaining. 

The sole staircase in the hall, that faithful reproduction of the “monks’ staircase,” enabled the villa’s occupants to reach their bedrooms. At the east end, a service staircase connected all floors, serving the pantry, dining room, and four guest bedrooms, each with a bathroom.

Modern facilities

The design of the villa made for a fluid, efficient interaction between the mistress of the house and her staff and guests. 

Gabrielle Chanel’s vision of domesticity differed from that of the English aristocracy: “Though she didn’t mind being waited on, she wanted to be able to take a few steps down a corridor without feeling as though she were reviewing a quiet army of footmen lined up at attention, whose supercilious gazes may have been reproaching her for being neither English, nor titled, nor a duchess.” 

She wanted modern facilities and means of communication. Streitz had not forgotten the precepts taught by Horta, who encouraged any changes that could improve domestic service and reduce the comings and goings of servants. 

Although architectural tradition meant that servants’ quarters were still located in otherwise unused sections of the house – attics and lofts – the whole basement space, where the kitchen and laundry were located, was vast and possessed high ceilings. 

Thanks to a ventilation system, air was drawn in from the cloister and circulated through numerous air shafts, providing the rooms with healthy air flow. The staff dining room and the kitchen received morning light through glazed doors that opened onto the basement courtyard, and they were equipped with a motorized dumb waiter and a bell board linked by internal telephones to every upstairs room, as in certain luxury hotels. 

The servants’ staircase was dedicated to the comings and goings of staff – the butler, housekeeper, steward, and cook – who made up the bedrooms and carried out upstairs service as fluidly and invisibly as possible, all the while respecting the privacy of the villa’s residents. The bathrooms were equipped with white porcelain tubs, adorned with tall mirrors that enhanced the space, and tiled with refined, visually striking opalescent white tiles. The only modernist touches were the metallic accessories and tubular chairs.

Visual and symbolic allusions

Chanel never commented on the underlying inspiration that shaped her vision of La Pausa. The writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, however, described how staggered the 12-year-old child had been when she first arrived at the Aubazine orphanage.

“Abruptly removed from the shabby lodgings in which she had grown up, from the presence, on all sides, of families who suffered as much as her own from lack of air, space, and money, but had plenty of human warmth to offer, how bewildering the vast edifices of Aubazine must have seemed to the little girl suddenly transplanted there.… Had she ever imagined such a unique sense of clarity?” 

Indeed, the architecture of La Pausa mirrors that of Aubazine and, through it, Cistercian monastic architecture.

La Pausa, The Ideal Mediterranean Villa of Gabrielle Chanel, is published by Flammarion price €150