Your Own €350 Million Home

An exclusive look inside Villa Les Cèdres, the most expensive house on Earth

- Thomas Buckley

The South of France has been home to a revolving door of the superrich for the past century. As their fates rose, industrialists, princes, and bankers built palaces along the Mediterranean, and as they fell—first the Russian aristocracy, Americans after the 1929 stock market crash, then much of the European upper class after World War II—they sold them to the world’s next crop of newly wealthy.

Now the owner of Villa Les Cèdres, a 187-year-old, 18,000-square-foot, 14-bedroom mansion set on 35 acres, hopes that its property will be the next to pass from old money to new. With a list price of €350 million ($410 million), the owner, the Italian distiller Davide Campari-Milano SpA, is betting that the house’s combination of history, luxury, and a prime location along the coast of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat will be enough to make it the most expensive residential sale in history.

Les Cèdres was built in 1830 and bought in 1850 by the mayor of Villefranche-sur-Mer, when it operated as an olive tree farm. (There are olive trees more than 300 years old on the grounds.) The mayor’s descendants sold the property to the Belgian King Leopold II in 1904, who, made stupendously rich by his exploitation of mineral resources and rubber trees in the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), expanded the gardens that still surround the home.