THE MAYBOURNE RIVIERA FRANCE

This slick arrival in the south of France is a crossover of starry chefs and headline names in hotel design.

- Lanie Goodman

The word is out. The sleepy village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, once a secret rendezvous for the avant-garde, is the south of France’s latest star. It’s taken a while. Nearly a century ago, Irish designer Eileen Gray parked her roadster beside the little train station here and set out to explore a footpath above the shimmering Mediterranean. A major figure of the Parisian Art Deco scene, she chose a plot of land amid this rocky terrain to build her visionary home-on-stilts, Villa E-1027 (now restored to perfection), designed with no break between interior and exterior; a prototype for modern living. A few years later, Coco Chanel built Villa Pausa above Roquebrune, entertaining Churchill, Cocteau, Picasso and Dalí. Only Virginia Woolf—a guest at Villa La Souco, another bohemian enclave—remained unimpressed by the isolated villas set on the cliff“like eggs” in a row, where you were doomed to endless contemplation of the sea and the rooftops of the Monte Carlo Casino.

Shift your gaze inland and skyward and you’ll spot the Grande Corniche, built by Napoleon and following the route of the ancient Via Julia Augusta, the mountainous road twisting and turning 1,500 feet above sea level. The plunging views (immortalised in Hitchcock’s Fifties classic