By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.
IN THE 1920S, the Côte d’Azur, that 430-mile stretch of rugged cliffs and blue waters on the southeastern edge of France, was a popular destination for what Gertrude Stein would call the Lost Generation, a loose-knit community of expatriate writers and artists. Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter and Virginia Woolf all spent summers there; in 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald finished a draft of his third novel, “The Great Gatsby,” in a rental home in Saint-Raphaël. By the time Gabrielle Chanel arrived in 1928 — the Parisian couturier, then 45 and known as Coco, purchased a pink bungalow on a five-acre olive orchard with fields of lavender in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, just east of Monaco — the French Riviera had established itself, as the Paris-born British writer W. Somerset Maugham would later put it, as “a sunny place for shady people.”
Chanel had the 1911 building torn down but kept its name, La Pausa, which, according to a 1914 New York Times piece about its original owners, the writers Charles Norris and Alice Muriel Williamson, nodded to the legend that the Virgin Mary, “disguised as a peasant, once came down to earth from heaven to test the region’s reputation for wickedness and found in that spot the only place where she was invited to take repose.” The Irish furniture designer and architect Eileen Gray was building her own villa, a Modernist masterpiece, just down the road, and other neighbors had embraced the various styles of the era: Renaissance Revival, Moorish, Belle Époque. But Chanel commissioned Robert Streitz, a relatively untested Belgian-born architect, to come up with an almost minimalist home that conjured the austere beauty of Aubazine Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in France’s Corrèze region where she is said to have passed much of her time as a teenager, along with her two sisters and her aunt Adrienne, who boarded there. “What genius to have spent all that money and for it not to show!” said the jeweler Fulco di Verdura.
On a visit to the newly restored house this March, Yana Peel, 50, Chanel’s president of arts, culture and heritage, emphasized La Pausa’s “spirit of wild luxury” — the monochromatic palette, bare walls and rare Baroque flourishes in the form of 18th-century candelabras and a tiered wrought-iron chandelier patinated with gold leaf. “It’s more Palladian than palatial,” she said of the three-story, 15,000-square-foot villa, which is built around a cloistered courtyard with a grid of grass and square slabs of stone that evokes the brand’s quilted-leather handbags. From a grand hall with a row of five windows on each side (a request from Chanel, who would return to the number when naming her signature fragrance), an imposing staircase leads to Chanel’s bedroom and the bedroom of the Duke of Westminster, her longtime companion, in the west wing and to three guest bedrooms and the former staff quarters in the east. Although Streitz had planned to include two symmetrical staircases, Chanel insisted on having only one: a white plaster interpretation of what she’d seen at Aubazine, which the brand is also helping to refurbish. “It’s interesting,” said the New York-based architect Peter Marino, 75, who’s been designing Chanel boutiques for over 30 years and who started the La Pausa project almost five years ago. “You’re finally able to build a house for the first time in your life because you have some real money — and you go back to what you grew up with.”
WHILE HER PEERS threw lavish balls, Chanel, whose jersey fabrics and women’s pants challenged the restrictive clothing of the era, went her own way. La Pausa’s architecture was unusual for the area, but so were the events she held there: Ignoring the rules of fine dining, Chanel preferred to serve casual buffet-style meals, of which she once said, “You dress or not as you choose for dinner.” Dancing was just as informal and spontaneous. By hosting artists for long stretches of time — Salvador Dalí lived and worked there with his wife, Gala, for four months — she also established her own version of an artists’ residency before such a thing would become widespread. In the book “La Pausa: The Ideal Mediterranean Villa of Gabrielle Chanel,” out this September, there’s a photograph of a sheet of paper covered with drawings and signatures by the likes of Dalí, the French poet Pierre Reverdy and the Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, who were all guests of Chanel’s in April 1938, around the time she was planning her contribution to Dalí’s 1939 ballet, “Bacchanale,” choreographed by Léonide Massine. (The designer had previously created the costumes for Jean Cocteau’s 1922 staging of “Antigone” and, two years later, for “Le Train Bleu,” performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.) But then World War II broke out and Chanel, who would later be identified as a Nazi sympathizer, visited less and less. In 1953, the couturier, having returned to Paris after spending almost a decade in Switzerland, sold La Pausa and all its contents to the Hungarian publisher and literary agent Emery Reves and his American wife, Wendy Reves, saying, “It is part of my past now and I don’t wish to go back to it.”
Ten years ago, the house of Chanel acquired La Pausa from the Dallas Museum of Art, which had inherited the property from Wendy, a socialite and philanthropist, in 2007. On Marino’s first trip there, he observed that although the Reveses had kept most of Chanel’s furniture and hadn’t made any major structural changes to the space, it felt “comfortable for a nice Texan family.” (Peel’s assessment was less subtle: “The bathroom was carpeted in pink,” she said.) Except for a few modern interventions — namely air-conditioning and new plumbing and wiring — Marino chose to return La Pausa to its 1935 glory. (“When you’re restoring something, you can’t do the library in 1936 and then the living room in 1942,” he said. To him, 1935 made the most sense: The interiors “changed more radically during the war, and we didn’t want to reflect that.”) His firm salvaged and repaired most of the oak paneling, which lines the walls of the ground-floor library and living room; and, in the main bathroom, reinstalled floor-to-ceiling mirrors, which create the illusion of an infinite field of vision. Although the house had been frequently photographed in Chanel’s time, the largely black-and-white images required Marino and Chanel’s archival team to guess about certain colors. “How gold was her headboard?” said Marino. “That was a little dicey.” The brand’s patrimony department bought back many of the original furnishings at auction or in antiques stores — before getting rid of them, the Reveses had stored some of the Chanel-era pieces they weren’t using, such as her bedroom furniture, in the basement — and Marino had the rest reproduced.
Today the stillness of La Pausa conjures Chanel’s definition of elegance. “Fashion does not exist only in dress,” she said. “Fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it’s in the sky and on the highway, it’s everywhere.” And now, once again, it’s here, too. Peel, who said she’s “trying to create the future with fragments of the past,” hopes to resurrect the house as a place where art is nurtured and ideas shared. In November, there’ll be a weeklong retreat for writers centered on the theme of the self-made woman. Until then, Peel is still deciding how to reintroduce La Pausa to the world. While describing her dream party — an artist-led celebration like the ones Chanel once threw — she pointed to a newly installed Steinway piano. One day soon, she hopes to roll up the rugs once more and get people dancing.
