Grasse’s own Villa Noailles

The Villa Noailles in Hyeres is a modernist masterpiece which is one of the star attractions of the Cote d’Azur. But Grasse has its own Villa Noailles with at least as interesting a history.

Ferdinand Bac and Villa Croisset

In 1908, Ferdinand Bac, a painter, caricaturist, decorator and art critic, visited a house in av Guy de Maupassant which was then known as the Ermitage de Saint Francois. He was bowled over: “for me [it was] one of the last survivors of a dying tradition, and the revelation of this humble beauty, so in keeping with its land, moved me”. You can see below what the house looked like to an artist a few years after Bac saw it, in 1922, and how, now known as the Villa Noailles, it looks today.

(Above) Ermitage de Saint Francois in 1922 in a watercolour by Jacques Lambert reproduced in L'Illustration magazine. (Below) Same building today, now the Villa Noailles. The artist had the advantage of being able to remove anything he didn't like, and the house in the centre doubtless wasn't there in 1922! The tall cypresses on the right still partially hide the house, but the garden to the left is radically different today.

On the other side of Grasse, on the road to Magagnosc, was the winter home of one Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné. Her house had been built as the Villa Isabelle in 1885 by John Bowes, who was a Liverpool cotton millionaire. He also financed the construction of an Anglican church on the edge of his land. It is still there today, now known as the Chapelle Victoria.

Marie-Thérèse bought the house supposedly because the Grasse climate would be good for the health of her only child from her first marriage, Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim. In 1910, she married her second husband, a Belgian playwright who had changed his birth-name from Franz Wiener to the much grander Francis de Croisset.

Bac was not impressed with the old Villa Isabella. He claimed that in 1912, over a dinner, he proposed to Marie-Thérèse to transform her “characterless house" and to create a true Mediterranean garden. Despite Bac’s total lack of experience of house or garden design, she agreed and Bac’s epiphany at the Ermitage de Saint Francois provoked a new Villa Croisset. His conception was a “pan-Mediterranean style”, with “a series of arcades, courtyards, enclosed gardens, through which one could perceive, in a sweet captivity, the enchantment of a nature”.

One of Bac's 'enclosed gardens' at Villa Croisset in a 1925 postcard

The new villa was built and its dream gardens laid out between 1913 and 1922. Bac and the Villa Croisset are the subject of a recently published book¹ by one of our local historians, Christian Zerry. Unfortunately, it's only available in French, but it has many illustrations of the Villa and Bac's designs.

(Above) Le Croisset today - a well kept development but what was lost in its creation? (Below) Not bad as a commemoration of an invented name! There was once also a school of the same name nearby.

The extraordinary estate which Bac created was destroyed in 1975 and replaced by apartments. All that remains is a chapel surrounded by what was once a small part of the gardens.

Marie-Laure de Noailles

Marie-Therese’s daughter by her first marriage, Marie-Laure, whose father had died at an early age, inherited her grandfather’s banking fortune when she was seven year old. In 1923, she married an aristocrat, Charles, Vicomte de Noailles. The couple moved into her grandfather’s house in Paris and she embarked on a fabulous career of art patronage, multiple love affairs and, after 1929, foul-mouthed eccentricity, seemingly triggered by finding her husband in bed with his personal trainer. Charles, an enthusiast for gardens, meanwhile had bought the old Ermitage de Saint Francois, no doubt knowing about it through Ferdinand Bac.

Villa Noailles, Hyères(Wikimedia)

She and Charles had Villa Noailles near Hyeres built to a design by a modernist architect and designer, Robert Mallet-Stevens, after, according to some reports, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe turned the job down. There they hosted an array of contemporary talent, including Dali, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Cocteau, Poulenc, Cecil Beaton and Andre Gide. They financed Buñuel’s film, notorious at the time, ‘L’Age d’Or’. Dali and Picasso painted Marie-Laure and Ray photographed her. Today, Hyeres’ Villa Noailles still stands as an art centre and epitome of 1920s modernism.

Robert Mallet-Stevens, completely out of character for an architect and designer for rich private clients, was prevailed upon to design Grasse’s new theatre in 1928 on the bd Jeu de Ballon (see here), and one can’t help thinking Marie-Laure and Charles had something to do with that.

The Noailles lived in Paris, taking their vacations with a wide variety of guests in Hyeres. During the Second War, Marie-Laure managed to stay in Paris under the occupation, but Charles took refuge in the Cote d’Azur. In 1947, clearly not wishing to resume intimate relations with Marie-Laure, who was in any case thoroughly involved elsewhere, he moved to the Ermitage, renaming it, rather confusingly, the Villa Noailles.

Villa Noailles: Grasse’s version

Perhaps on dubious authority, it is said that Marie-Laure, when asked, “Who does Charles like best, men or women?” replied “He likes flowers”. Whether true or not, he proceeded to devote his life, until his death there in 1981, to the garden in Grasse. My neighbour well remembers seeing him in church.

The garden of our Villa Noailles today is open only for a short period on Friday afternoons in April and May and no longer looks quite as it once did, despite the best efforts of its gardeners. There are over three hectares of cultivation, and it must be impossible to maintain it as Charles de Noailles was able to keep it.

But it’s still well worth seeing. Like the mills of Les Ribes scattered around it, its life depends upon the abundant springs of the Roquevignon massif above, and water can be heard and seen flowing everywhere. Charles said of it, “There are gardens that are said to be fragrant. I would say that this one sings."

Clockwise from top left: lavender parterre; fish-pond; Judas Tree pergola; entrance with statue

There are at least twenty water features, a large bed of peonies, a pergola of Judas trees, a parterre of lavender and a variety of magnolias and other flowering shrubs. Below and around the planted gardens is a large olive grove with many spring flowers.

The English connection

Charles de Noailles was a vice president of the UK's Royal Horticultural Society, and his garden design is said to be English influenced. He knew the prolific English landscape gardener Russell Page, who designed the garden of Domaine Saint-Jacques du Couloubrier only five kilometres away, and who is said to have suggested the Judas Tree pergola. Another British friend was the owner of the famous gardens of Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire and Serre de la Madone in Menton, Lawrence Johnston.

Charles was an authority on gardens in his own right. Towards the end of his life, he published a reference book named ‘Plantes de Jardins Méditerranéens’² along with a fellow RHS member, Roy Lancaster.

Not much changed: the lawn of the garden. On the left, photograph from ‘Plantes de Jardins Méditerranéens’ in 1977; right, as it looks today.

Roy, who is still going strong at 88, has been a co-presenter of the long-running BBC TV programme ‘Gardeners’ World’ (today hosted by Monty Don) and was a stalwart of BBC Radio’s even longer running (since 1947!), ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’.

Charles de Noailles in his garden. Photograph by Valerie Finnis, RHS Lindley Collections

Roy Lancaster and Charles de Noailles' book includes images of gardens at the Villa Noailles, La Garoupe, Ventimiglia (Hanbury) and Roquebrune and is otherwise a reference for Mediterranean garden plants, with excellent photography. The photo of Charles de Noailles was taken by another English gardener (and photographer), Valerie Finnis and is in a collection bequeathed by her to the Royal Horticultural Society

(1) ‘Ferdinand Bac sur la Riviera’ Christian Zerry (2024, Editions Campanile).

(2) ‘Plantes de Jardins Méditerranéens’, Le Vicomte de Noailles and Roy Lancaster, Larousse, 1977