Head over heels

When Coco Chanel and architect Eileen Gray built Modernist houses on the French Riviera in 1929, they sparked a fascination with Romantic Modernism that beguiled the likes of Cocteau, Sir Winston Churchill and more. Justine Picardie pays a visit

- Justine Picardie

IN the lost landscape of the mythical French Riviera—that shimmering stretch of coastline immortalised in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the art of Picasso, Matisse and Cocteau— there is one place that still retains much of its magical spirit: the secluded enclave of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. For here is the breathtaking view of infinite sky and sparkling sea that inspired Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel to create her beautiful hilltop villa in 1929, the same year that another leading figure of the avant-garde, the Irish-born designer Eileen Gray, completed her own Modernist house on the rocky shoreline of the Mediterranean.

If you are lucky enough to visit the Maybourne Riviera today (and there is no better hotel in which to stay in the area, as you would expect from a sister property to Claridge’s in London), you will find yourself perfectly positioned between these two iconic properties—one above, one below (rooms from €750 per night (about £640); www.maybourne riviera.com). Fortunately, the Maybourne Riviera is itself notable for its remarkable design, including subtle echoes of Chanel and Gray’s respective interpretations of romantic Modernism. Unlike the extreme radicalism proposed by Le Corbusier, who, in 1921, declared that a house should be ‘a machine for living’, both Chanel and Gray had a more poetic, lyrical approach to making themselves at home on the Côte d’Azur.