Les Noailles “A life of patrons”

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The recent visit to Villa Noailles, on the occasion of the International Festival of Fashion and Photography , allowed us to discover the fabulous history of this villa and its illustrious inhabitants, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. This villa is one of the very first modern-style buildings built in France. Designed in December 1923 and inhabited from January 1925, the initial villa built for Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens applies the founding precepts of the rationalist movement: functionality, purification of decorative elements, roofs , terraces, light, hygiene.

The extensions that will follow one another until 1933 as well as the remarkable development of the site (courtyard, gardens) will make the modest holiday home a real motionless liner of 1,800 m2: fifteen master bedrooms, all jewelry retouch service equipped with bathrooms, a swimming pool, a squash court, a hairdresser, a resident gym teacher, etc. Clocks connected to a central system, Heliotrope house, overlooking the bay of Hyères, the villa Noailles celebrates a new art of living where the body and nature are privileged. The decoration calls on an impressive list of personalities: Louis Barillet for the stained glass windows, Pierre Chareau, Eileen Gray, Djo-Bourgeois and Francis Jourdain for the furniture.


Gabriel Guévrékian for the cubist garden, Piet Mondrian, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, Constantin Brancusi or Alberto Giacometti for the works of art. Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim (1902-1970) was only two years old when her father Maurice died, leaving her at the age of majority significant capital from the family bank and the remarkable collection of paintings from her grandparents. Two characters will particularly mark his youth: his grandmother, Laure de Chevigné, whose modern spirit inspired Proust his Duchess of Guermantes, and a young poet, Jean Cocteau. It is through her that she meets the pictorial, musical and literary avant-gardes.