In Monaco, a night at Villa la Vigie
The most beautiful villa in Monaco? First, you have to go behind the Monte Carlo Beach, a legendary hotel built at the end of the 1920s at the eastern tip of the Principality, in the territory of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and immediately becomes the meeting place for all celebrities who have passed through the Rock, Gabrielle Chanel first, as known the guests of the cruise parade from the house to the double “c”. With its tiled roofs, its porphyry-coloured coating, its sapphire blue swimming pool stretching out facing the Mediterranean, the “Beach”, as the regulars say, was named a few years ago in interior designer India Madhavi and the landscape architect Jacques Mus, solar tandem which gave the place a new youth. This December day, the “Beach” is closed, the car park almost empty, the car is just passing to go up the road which, behind, unrolls in the bend its asphalt carpet among the pines and the olive trees. Almost no one ever comes here. Rare are those who ring the intercom of the large black gate, simply marked: “La Vigie”.
Exotic birds and decorations of the Monaco Opera
The watch ? It’s a myth. A white cube overlooking the sea, surrounded by infinite blue. A visual landmark that can be guessed from the Rock and completely hidden in a lush garden. Karl Lagerfeld, a regular in the Principality, made this immaculate building his residence for thirteen years. This dream address is first discovered through the gates, at the end of an alley lined with lemon trees, cypresses and bougainvilleas. The car is gone: this type of place can be discovered on foot. Quit going the wrong way. Built at the very beginning of the 20th century for (and by) Sir William Ingram (1847-1924), British politician and leader of theIllustrated London News, a Gatsby of the time keen on paintings by masters and exotic birds that he collected in an aviary, his access by car is indeed “English style”, including: from the left. For my part, it’s ball in mind that I go to the right, the opportunity to botanize in a garden all the more wonderful as we are in winter. If Sir William’s aviary is no longer there, one can imagine floating among the flowers the souls of successive occupants: an ephemeral English businessman, the wife of an American opera singer, and even the employees of the Opera and Ballets de Monaco, when after the war the sets were stored there…
But the time, for me, is in reverse, re-passing in front of the gate, walking up the left aisle. Upstairs, the governess is waiting for me, half-smiling, half-surprised. I must undoubtedly be one of the rare visitors to use my soles, with, on the left, the immensity of the sea, and on the right, this majestic building with surprisingly clean lines. An avant-garde choice for our British media man: at the same time, Beatrice de Rothschild chose the neo-Renaissance style for its (sublime) Villa Ephrussi, a treasure that can still be visited in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. In Beaulieu, the architect and statesman Théodore Reinach had preferred, for its Villa Kerylosthe reconstruction of an ancient Greek residence, with all the necessary statues, mosaics and frescoes worthy of a museum.
The taste of a certain simplicity (and the most beautiful jacuzzi on the Riviera)
La Vigie looks down on all of this. Perched on its rocky peak, it is accessed by a porch supported by four columns. A vast reception hall provides access to the lounges and dining room, opening onto a huge terrace overlooking an emerald-coloured lawn, and what is undoubtedly, just below, the best-located jacuzzi in the world. Just like the kitchen, whose windows all overlook the sea (and whose fridge is abundantly stocked with bottles of champagne). Not much remains of Karl Lagerfeld’s time: on the ground floor, two mirrors by Philippe Starck. His office, which he had chosen with his back to the sea so as not to be distracted, is now a billiard room. Upstairs, the bedrooms, with their bathrooms larger than many Parisian apartments. The dressmaker lived, I am told, in the one on the left. And if the round bed and the wall-mounted silks have disappeared, the bathtub facing the bathroom window promises a bath that one imagines magical, immersed in the infinite azure of the sea on which the winter sun shimmers.