‘Lunch can last all day and all night’: inside Coco Chanel’s sunny sanctuary of art stars | Build

IThis is where Salvador Dali painted The Enigma of Hitler, a haunting landscape featuring a giant telephone receiver that appears to be weeping tears over a cut-out image of the Führer. Conceived in 1939, the work seems to anticipate war. It is also where Winston Churchill wrote parts of his multi-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and painted his view in dim light. Somerset Maugham was also visiting, as well as novelist Colette, composer Igor Stravinsky and playwright Jean Cocteau, where they shared lunches that lasted all day and night, with debates and discussions of artistic ideas.

That place is La Bauza: the Mediterranean villa in the hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, once owned by the writing duo Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Morel Williamson, followed by French fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who rebuilt it from scratch at the end of the 1920s. She later sold it to American publishers, Emery and Wendy Reeves.

The sprawling, white-walled house — with blue shutters and black windows grouped in groups of five in homage to Chanel’s No. 5 — has been restored to its original specifications, after the luxury fashion brand bought it back in 2015. Architect Peter Marino studied countless photographs to get it right: from the concrete squares that lie in a quilt-like grid over the lawn, to the cactus pot at the foot of the house. The stairs. The original bed frames were also purchased, as well as a fully mirrored bathroom installed, not unlike the one at 31 Rue Cambon, Coco’s Paris address.

But when you’re renovating a place with such a rich past, how do you capture its spirit, honor its history, and bring to life the words and minds of its illustrious guests to create the most multi-layered image ever created? basic. You are building a library.

Bookshelves are a record of the knowledge, personalities and ideas that have swirled around someone’s mind, reflecting their interests and desires, and their friends – often in the case of artists or writers. Whenever I go into an artist’s studio, or visit someone’s home, I’m always curious about what lives on their shelves—especially if the writers are no longer alive. It’s an intimate way to get to know someone. It deepens our understanding of them, gives us access to their inner worlds, and takes us places we never knew they went.

I remember visiting Alice Neel’s apartment in Manhattan and seeing many of her books on topics ranging from socialism to psychoanalysis. Leonora Carrington’s house in Mexico City was filled with texts on Buddhism, magic, and Celtic history, as well as books on loneliness.

But what if someone’s library can continue to grow after they’re gone? If the people of La Pausa had lived, what books would they have continued to read, and how would we view them today?

This was the challenge set by Chanel during the restoration, with the help of specialist booksellers Hatchards in London (where Coco’s lover, the Duke of Westminster, had an account) and 7L in Paris. Looking at a list of 100 books Chanel is known to cherish and read, the team began selecting titles in keeping with her scholarship. But they also wanted to create a broader picture of her friends and interests, and who and what passed through La Bauza. “And what has happened since then, across music, architecture and imagination,” says Jana Bell, head of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel.

Entering the wood-paneled library was like entering the minds and worlds of those who had stood there before me. Biographies of Picasso by John Richardson, rare editions of Cecil Beaton’s scrapbook, and dust jackets designed by Vanessa Bell for her sister Virginia Woolf’s book, Waves; As well as first releases for those who frequented the French Riviera, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. There were also books by (or about) the guests who visited the villa, from Somerset Maugham to Greta Garbo, as well as glimpses into their own worlds, with limited volumes of Jean Cocteau’s letters.

“We believe the future is made of parts of the past,” Bell says, which is why the library has also been updated with works by Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Cusk. To make it more contemporary, Bill says, “When our guests come to visit us, they will leave their own books.”

Standing and admiring the library as a whole, you get the sense of a sprawling network of artists who have worked, spoken, inspired and consumed each other’s works – directly and indirectly – across the centuries. And in its midst there was a woman who shaped, and continues to shape, the culture to this day. But why is the library important to her?

Books were Coco’s medium to escape from her difficult and humble beginnings. At the age of 11, she was left parentless after her mother died of tuberculosis and her father left his daughters in an orphanage run by Cistercian nuns at the Aubazine Abbey. She never found clever ways to access books with a lot of money: “I read everything… We never bought books at home; we cut out the serial from the newspaper and sewed together long pages of yellow paper. This is what little Coco kept secret… She copied whole passages from novels… [they] You taught me life.”

Books were a refuge, a channel for Coco to dream of being the heroine of her own wonderful story and imagine an endless afterlife for herself. One has to remember how difficult it was for her as a woman to build an empire from scratch, decades before women had the right to vote in France. It would have required an enormous amount of imagination and storytelling. “Books were my best friends,” she said.

So when it came to restoring La Bauza, the library was supposed to be its beating heart and its contemplative mind, the place that held everything together. In many ways, aren’t all our bookshelves like that? They reflect back to us what we have done, learned, and stored within us; Who we met (sometimes literally and also imaginatively) and how we escaped. As with Neel’s and Carrington’s, they reveal our curiosities, secrets and desires. Memory palaces, which house our vast inner worlds, can be the most intimate images of all. Take a look at your bookshelves and ask: “What do they say about me?”