Porcelain objects by Aldo Bakker at Villa Noailles.
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Published: August 4, 2013
HYÈRES, France — When a flag bearing the Noailles family crest fluttered above Villa Noailles in the 1920s and 1930s, the house was renowned as one of the most luxurious homes in the south of France and an avant-garde haunt where Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti and Igor Stravinsky had holidayed, and Man Ray had shot a surrealist film “Les Mystères du Château du Dé.” So why has that aristocratic insignia been replaced by the straggly, colorful contraption now flying from the flagpole?
It is a windsock made by the Dutch designer Bertjan Pot to celebrate an exhibition of his work in what were once the swimming pool and squash court of the house built by the Parisian art collectors Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Months after their marriage in 1923, they commissioned the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to design it as their holiday home on the site of a ruined Saracen fort on a wooded hill above the pretty Provençal town of Hyères.
Not that anyone who is interested in design needs an excuse to visit Villa Noailles, which was inspired by the radical De Stijl movement in the Netherlands and is hailed as an important early example of Art Deco architecture. But Mr. Pot’s show and a cluster of other design exhibitions, all running through Sept. 29, make going there seem even more enticing.
Villa Noailles is a perfect forum for modern and contemporary design, and not just because of its architectural pedigree. Like her husband, Marie-Laure de Noailles belonged to a grand French family (her ancestors included the Marquis de Sade and the Comtesse de Chevigné, an inspiration for the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”) but she was also the heiress to a banking fortune that enabled her to live in extreme opulence. As well as filling Villa Noailles with the work of artists like Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian and Giacometti, she and her spouse commissioned furniture from Pierre Chareau, Eileen Gray and other progressive designers. Equally radical was their choice of landscape architect, Gabriel Guevrekian, who designed the gardens in an iconoclastic Cubist style.
The couple eventually separated. (An entry in the journal of the novelist André Gide describing how he and his host frolicked naked in the pool with their respective boyfriends helps to explain why.) Charles de Noailles spent subsequent summers on a nearby family estate, while his estranged wife stayed at Villa Noailles. But she lost control of her fortune after a scandalous affair, and by the 1950s, the house had started to deteriorate. After her death in 1970, it was sold it to the town, but became increasingly decrepit, until its restoration in the late 1980s.
Villa Noailles has since hosted an annual fashion and photography festival and, more recently, Design Parade, a summer exhibition of work by young product and furniture designers. Each Design Parade provides a snapshot of current design thinking, and the current show, the eighth in the series, is particularly strong.
Among this summer’s participants, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini has produced an ingenious series of trestle tables in an elegantly rational style, while Laureline Galliot’s exuberant objects reflect the growing interest of young designers in experimenting with handcraftsmanship.
One designer in each Design Parade is awarded the Grand Prix (this year it went to Mr. Peyroulet Ghilini) and is invited to stage a solo show at Villa Noailles the following summer. The exhibition devoted to last year’s winner, the Swiss designer Julie Richoz, includes the outcome of her residencies at the Sèvres porcelain works and the Cirva contemporary glass center in Marseille. The vases she made there in vividly colored, interlocking slabs of glass are dazzling examples of how a traditional material can be reinvigorated by being translated into dynamic, new forms.
Elsewhere in the house, Mr. Pot has filled the swimming pool and squash court with his comically surreal objects, and his compatriot Aldo Bakker has commandeered the gymnasium to present the seemingly simple, intensely subtle jugs and containers he designed in Sèvres porcelain. Another highlight is a survey of the Modernist furniture and architecture produced by the mid-20th century Hungarian designer Marcel Breuer. Beginning in Villa Noailles, it continues in the Medieval setting of the nearby Knights Templar Tower, which dates back to the 12th century.
An hour’s drive from Villa Noailles is another modern architectural masterpiece, albeit of a different type: La Cité Radieuse in Marseille, which was designed by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a new model of mass housing. Conceived as a vertical village, La Cité Radieuse combines more than 300 apartments with a “street” of shops, a post office, a hotel and restaurants on one floor and a roof terrace that includes a paddling pool, children’s art school and panoramic views over the Marseille rooftops to the Mediterranean and Provençal hills.
One of the pleasures of visiting La Cité Radieuse is that you can wander in and look around, just like a conventional village. For a few weeks each summer, visitors can also see inside the apartment belonging to Jean-Marc Drut, who works for the fashion company Comme des Garçons, and the actor Patrick Blauwart.
Every year, they invite a different designer to install his or her furniture in the apartment while it is open to the public. The German designer Konstantin Grcic is responsible for this summer’s show, which runs through Aug. 15. He has filled the apartment with his angular, technocratic chairs, tables and lights, and pinned giant prints of portraits from a 1970s punk fanzine on the walls.
The result is an engaging insight into Mr. Grcic’s work and an unforgettable opportunity to see how thoughtfully Le Corbusier and his team, which included Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé, designed the apartments. The sensitivity with which they divided the interiors and enlivened them with natural light and splashes of color make the modest homes in La Cité Radieuse seem as luxurious in their own way as the opulent Villa Noailles.