A Mediterranean Vision

The restoration of this neo-Classical villa and garden bring to life the extraordinary vision of Ferdinand Bac, an artist, writer and garden designer. Tim Richardson reports

- Tim Richardson

SET high above Menton, the last town on the French Riviera before the Italian border, is a spectacular house that enjoyed an international reputation for a brief period after its completion in 1927. this is Les Colombières, the extraordinary vision of the Franco-German designer, artist and writer Ferdinand Bac. It has recently been restored as a private house and deserves to be celebrated again.

Bac had a curious pedigree. He was born in 1859 in Stuttgart as Ferdinand- Sigismond Bach, the son of a geologist, cartographer and landscape architect who was himself the illegitimate son of Jérôme Bonaparte, one of Napoleon’s brothers and latterly King of Westphalia.

His mother was a scion of a Bohemian aristocratic family who was born out of wedlock, but moved in elevated circles thanks to her diplomat father. All her life, she retained close ties with what remained of the French Court. As a result, her son was brought up in Germany, but with powerful links to France’s regimes, both aristocratic and Napoleonic.

Overtones of nostalgia for ‘old europe’, perhaps exacerbated by a sense of personal exile, can be detected throughout his work, notably in his voluminous travel writings. As Les Colombières attests, however, he was well aware of the dangers of pastiche and sentimentality.

As a very young man, aged only 16, Ferdinand travelled to Paris to train as an artist. He was to live mainly in France for the rest of his life, although he also spent long periods travelling around europe.

It was in about 1880 that he dropped the final ‘h’ of his surname to make it sound more French than German. During that decade, he made a name for himself as a caricaturist satirising the mores of Parisian society, specialising in mildly salacious depictions of ‘modern Frenchwomen’.