A SACRED PAUSE

IN 1928, COCO CHANEL CONJURED HER RIVIERA GETAWAY INTO BEING, COMPLETE WITH ARTIST FRIENDS, LAVENDER FIELDS, AND A CLAY COURT WORTHY OF ROLAND GARROS. FOLLOWING A MAGNIFICENT RESTORATION OF LA PAUSA, AS THE PROPERTY IS KNOWN, A NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE HOUSE'S VIBRANT HISTORY

- KEZIAH WEIR

The year prior, the writer, who had a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer dubbed L’Orangerie, gained a new Riviera neighbor in Gabrielle Chanel.

The 45-year-old couturier, who would, ironically, later describe her clientele to Morand as “busy women,” had purchased herself a slice of this Gallic paradise, a 1911 bungalow in the craggy hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin—the top of the regional portmanteau being, Morand wrote, “an old fortified village where red and yellow houses, like pimento trees, are rooted in the rocks, among lemon and orange trees,” and the bottom filled with “silver olive trees, with the last homes of millionaires.”

By Chanel’s arrival, the Riviera was a well-established hotbed of creative idyll, a place where Pablo Picasso rendered the ink heiress Sara Murphy and F. Scott Fitzgerald hunted (unsuccessfully) for Edith Wharton, hoping to discuss his work in progress The Great Gatsby—though it was royalty rather than artistry that had cemented the region's status as the place to be. The extravagant Excelsior Hotel Regina, which loomed above Nice, was built in the last gasps of the 19th century with 400 bedrooms and 233 baths so that Queen Victoria, who vacationed there for more than a dozen years, might accommodate the large entourage of the Empress of India. In its wake, grand homes—Florentine revivals, Moorish villas, Tudor cottages—popped up in the surrounding towns and communes like the violets and primroses that dotted their hillsides each spring.