A SACRED PAUSE

IN 1928, COCO CHANEL CONJURED HER RIVIERA GETAWAY INTO BEING, COMPLETE WITH ARTIST FRIENDS, LAVENDER FIELDS, AND A CLAY COURT WORTHY OF ROLAND GARROS. FOLLOWING A MAGNIFICENT RESTORATION OF LA PAUSA, AS THE PROPERTY IS KNOWN, A NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE HOUSE'S VIBRANT HISTORY

KEZIAH WEIR

IN A WORLD ofstruggle,ofrain,ofmud,ofgrey steel," the French author and diplomat Paul Morand wrote of the Cote d'Azur in a 1929 article for this magazine, "it is the one region which strives to guard, in a softening air, the secret of doing nothing, and the sweetness of living nobly, that is to say, idly and slowly."

The year prior, the writer, who had a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer dubbed L'Orangerie, gained a new Riviera neighbor in Gabrielle Chanel. The 45-year-old couturier, who would, ironically, later describe her clientele to Morand as "busy women," had purchased herself a slice of this Gallic paradise, a 1911 bungalow in the craggy hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin—the top of the regional portmanteau being, Morand wrote, "an old fortified village where red and yellow houses, like pimento trees, are rooted in the rocks, among lemon and orange trees," and the bottom filled with "silver olive trees, with the last homes of millionaires."

By Chanel's arrival, the Riviera was a well-established hotbed of creative idyll, a place where Pablo Picasso rendered the ink heiress Sara Murphy and F. Scott Fitzgerald hunted (unsuccessfully) for Edith Wharton, hoping to discuss his work in progress The Great Gatsby—though it was royalty rather than artistry that had cemented the region's status as the place to be. The extravagant Excelsior Hotel Regina, which loomed above Nice, was built in the last gasps of the 19th century with 400 bedrooms and 233 baths so that Queen Victoria, who vacationed there for more than a dozenyears, might accommodate the large entourage of the Empress of India. In its wake, grand homes—Florentine revivals, Moorish villas, Tudor cottages—popped up in the surrounding towns and communes like the violets and primroses that dotted their hillsides each spring.

Chanel bought the pink bungalow, called La Pausa ("the pause") by its first owners, the writers Alice Muriel and Charles Norris Williamson, and promptly tore it down. In its stead she hired, for the sole building project of her career, the architect Robert Streitz to create a three-story, 15,000-square-foot manor home with a sober off-white facade and gridded windows and walkways that call to mind her iconic quilted bags. But she did keep an enormous olive tree sprawling at the entrance—and the name.

La Pausa: The Ideal Mediterranean Villa of Gabrielle Chanel captures the story of the house and its environs. Its publication, overseen by Yana Peel, Chanel's president of arts, culture, and heritage, corresponds with the completion of a five-year restoration of the house, helmed by longtime Chanel architect Peter Marino. Published by Flammarion and printed in Verona, it's book as objet d'art, with a cloth cover the kind of cobalt blue found a hundred yards off the Mediterranean coast or splashed on a cathedral ceiling, and endpapers precision-matched to La Pausa's shutters. This shade, like a cloudless sky in midsummer, at once natural and electric and over which Marino agonized, is so custom that Pantone doesn't recognize it. Between these blues nestle more than 500 photographs and collected ephemera: Deco posters advertising the Riviera's soigne pleasures, sketches of Chanel made by friends and lovers, major artistic works by members of her social set, her architect's bills from a garden center in Menton and a landscape designer in Nice, a loose-leaf reproduction of the house blueprint. Peel tells me that she spent a year thinking about the colors that would best capture what she calls "the sense of the South of France," drawing from a limited palette of whites and greens and dusty purple, pulled from the house's tones, and the region's natural fauna and fields of lavender.

Chanel was nothing if not enigmatic, but the house—a highly personal project that teemed with life under her stewardship—offers an intimate glimpse of the self-made artisan who revolutionized the way women dress. Her primary inspiration, for instance: the Cistercian abbey of Aubazine, in the forested Correze region, where she had lived as a child after her mother's death and father's abandonment. "Much later, instead of describing those sterile times," writes Héléne Fulgence, Chanel's head of heritage sites, "she would reweave the truth into an ever-shifting legend." When it came time to build her own home, she wove her memories of the abbey into Streitz's architectural plans, describing Aubazine's enormous staircase, worn down by the monks' footsteps. The resulting home, as Marino said to Peel in a conversation that introduces the book, "couldn't look more like a convent if you stood on your head and spit nickels!"

Despite its monastic ties, the house was a labor of romantic love. "You could say she did the house for the Duke of Westminster," Peel noted to Marino of Chanel's longtime paramour. "She made for him a beautiful cerused oak-paneled room, and then made for herself a bed with a shining star on top of it, and then a mirrored bathroom." When the relationship ended, Chanel reassigned his bedroom to her self-described "only woman friend," Misia Sert, the Russian-born social maven who'd helped the designer gain entrée into Cote d'Azur society, and patron and muse to such artists as Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, and Renoir.

The Vogue editor Bettina Wilson, after a stay at La Pausa, suggested that "one of Chanel's great skills was to surround herself with intelligent people the better to shine," writes Flavia Frigeri, Chanel curator for the collection at London's National Portrait Gallery. "Whether Chanel was so calculating is hard to say, but what is certain is that she chose to surround herself with creative figures." The house became a hub of avant-garde intelligentsia. The novelist Colette lived nearby, and guests of La Pausa included Franco Zefferelli, Gala and Salvador Dali, and Jean Cocteau—the latter of whom Chanel gave his own small house on the property. It became a place of artistic percolation and relaxation, of tree climbing, buffet lunches, and photo shoots in which Chanel's spotted Great Dane, Gigot, often took center stage.

Chanel and others in her set made their way to La Pausa via the Calais-to-Mediterranean Express, a stylish train with steel blue carriages, luxurious sleeping suites, and René Lalique molded glass panels. The rail line was such an iconic aspect of the world of the Riviera that Cocteau took its affectionate nickname for the title of his insouciant 1924 one-act ballet, Le Train Bleu, which poked gentle fun at the Cote d'Azur's see-and-be-seen leisure class, and for which Chanel designed the costumes, from the golf shoes to the tennis skirts and swimsuits. (Two years earlier Cocteau had commissioned Chanel to create costumes for his adaptation of Antigone, telling one interviewer, "I couldn't imagine the daughters of Oedipus being badly dressed.") The ballet premiered at the Theatre des Champs-^lysées, Paris, produced by Ballet Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, and a stage curtain created by Picasso featuring two breast-bared figures cavorting under a deep blue sky. The historical arm of the house of Chanel has been involved in a painstaking recreation of the costumes, and a restoration of Picasso's 36-foot tapestry, Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race), which is now on view to the public for the first time in a century at London's V&A East Storehouse.

In 1935, while visiting Chanel at La Pausa, Chanel's lover Paul Iribe suffered a fatal heart attack during a game of tennis, a tragedy that presaged a period darkened by loss and wartime. Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, Chanel's great-niece, is quoted in the book recalling the summer of 1938. " I have an image fixed in my head of Coco and her friends, Pierre Reverdy, Maria de Gramont, Salvador Dali and his wife Gala, all clustered around the radio, stupefied and petrified as they listened to the voice of Hitler." Dali was at the house, in fact, to paint what would become his unsellable psychosexual nightmare, The Enigma of Hitler.

Chanel herself would slip back into the shadows during the war, and that part of her legacy remains murky to this day. She attempted to use the Aryan laws to gain control of rights to Chanel No. 5 and was reportedly assigned the code name Westminster during her role in Operation Modellhut, a harebrained effort by a rogue Nazi commander to negotiate a separate peace treaty between Britain and Germany. But archival materials from a 2023 London exhibition have also suggested she worked with the Resistance. After the war she visited La Pausa less and less often— it held, perhaps, too many ghosts. In 1953, when she sold the house to Emery Reves, the writer, publisher, and literary agent to Winston Churchill, she included the entirety of its contents in the sale, from her furniture to her photographs. Ten years ago, the fashion house of Chanel purchased the home from the French company SCI La Pausa; five years later, restorations began, "it was very much about the precision of reenactment," Peel says, "bringing this back exactly to a moment where Gabrielle Chanel herself might've just been entertaining Dali or Cocteau." Marino, who previously restored Chanel's vineyards at Chateau Rauzan-Segla and Chateau Canon, consulted hundreds of photos of Chanel at La Pausa. The only contemporary "intrusions," per Marino's account to Peel: "modern air conditioning, plumbing, and electricity." Peel and her team have restocked the tranquil library with more than 1,000 volumes— sourced from 7L, the Parisian bookstore founded by Karl Lagerfeld, and Hatchards, the Piccadilly shop founded in 1797, at which the Duke of Westminster was once a frequent patron—that include the travel books written by La Pausa's first owners, tomes by guests like Dali and Reverdy, as well as contemporary fiction and works on dance, gardens, and art. Much of Chanel's original furniture and decor remains, including a sunburst-rimmed clock, though the carpets, having withstood years of visitors and constant rolling up for guests to dance, were in "tatters," Peel says, and had to be re-created. Chanel kept two huge Monstrose cacti on the staircase, which tower over Gala and Salvador Dali in one 1938 photograph. "We bought two little ones from the botanical garden that we have grown for three years," Marino told Peel. Still, when the book went to press they remained small enough to fit on a windowsill. "We're desperate! They're terribly slow-growing." For now, a stately pair of Euphorbia candelabrum cacti, grown in Spain, stand in their stead.

The house had its soft relaunch this summer during Art Basel, with a private dinner and slate of performances. Boris Charmatz, artistic director of the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, performed a dance on the tennis court; the musician Alice Smith inaugurated the piano; Diana Picasso, the painter's granddaughter, was in attendance. This fall, a group of four writers chosen by the critic Merve Emre will take up temporary residence at the house in a writers retreat. "Fashion does not exist only in dresses," Chanel once told Morand. "Fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it's in the sky and on the highway, it's everywhere, it has to do with ideas, with social mores, with events." It lives on in her house, and its restoration and reinvigoration is all an effort, "in a very humble way," Peel says, "to bring back some of this energy."