Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel built only one home in her lifetime. La Pausa, perched on the cliffs of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, was conceived in the late 1920s as both sanctuary and stage. It was here that Chanel gathered an avant-garde circle of friends including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Colette, even the great rival, Christian Dior, in his pre-couturier years. Salvador Dalí spent months at the villa during the Spanish Civil War, completing eleven paintings and drafting his memoirs. In the evenings, Misia Sert played piano, and dancing spilled out toward the sea.

La Pausa was built with precision but without pretension. Chanel’s chosen architect, Robert Streitz, looked to Aubazine Abbey, where she spent her childhood, for inspiration. The villa unfolds like a cloister, monastic yet modern, with soaring ceilings, arches of pale stone. Furnishings were simple but carefully chosen: Spanish chairs, Persian carpets, a gilded wrought-iron bed with a gold star motif. Nature was respected above all. Chanel refused to uproot a single olive tree, insisting paths curve around them, lavender and wild plants growing freely in the sun-drenched garden.

The house embodied her philosophy: restraint over ostentation, spontaneity over formality. Lunches were served at an unadorned wooden table, never set the same way twice. Guests chose their seats, conversations stretching across afternoon strolls, tennis matches on the clay court, or games of roulette later in Monte Carlo.

Decades later, Karl Lagerfeld extended this Riviera narrative. While reinventing Chanel for the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he too made the Côte d’Azur his refuge, in the villa La Vigie overlooking Monte Carlo. He transformed the south of France into a runway, most memorably with Chanel’s Cruise 2010/11 show in Saint-Tropez, where models arrived by boat, paraded along Quai Jean Jaurès, and turned the iconic café Sénéquier into a front row. Further shows and activations followed, from immersive pop-ups to Chanel’s 2022 “Summer Tour” in Saint-Tropez, embedding the house’s presence in the region as a living tradition. Both Chanel and Lagerfeld found in the Riviera a theatre for invention, where light, and culture fused seamlessly with fashion.

In 2015, the house of Chanel acquired La Pausa and began a meticulous restoration under architect Peter Marino. Over a decade, Marino traced fading photographs, reacquired scattered furniture at auction, and nursed giant candelabra cacti back to life. The olive grove remains untouched, the interiors renewed yet unchanged in spirit. “I wanted the house to feel as if Mademoiselle had just stepped out of the room five minutes earlier,” Marino recalls.

Reopened today as a private home and cultural site, La Pausa is once again alive with Chanel’s impressive artistic programming and exchange. From Picasso at the dinner table to Lagerfeld’s Saint-Tropez catwalks, the Côte d’Azur has always been more than backdrop for Chanel: an eternal source of inspiration.

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Image: Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, who commissioned architect Robert Streitz to design La Pausa, in the home’s entryway. (Image credit: Photography by Roger Schall © Schall Collection)