Inside Jean Cocteau’s dreamiest creation – now available to rent
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Billionaire’s playground: few places warrant the moniker as thoroughly as does Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on the Côte d’Azur. Its sprawling estates are sequestered from proletarian eyes by tall walls and automated security gates. The houses on them catalogue a century’s worth of architectural folly, from belle époque confections to contemporary behemoths cosplaying as intergalactic spacecraft.
Two hundred years ago, however, when this peninsula was known as Cap-Saint-Sospir and was largely the preserve of fishermen, things were simpler, and a lot sparser. Even in the first years of the 20th century, private estates, many belonging to royal families, were only just beginning to colour the landscape.
In 1948, a modest two-storey villa near the peninsula’s southernmost point was acquired by Alec and Francine Weisweiller. He was a millionaire French cousin of the Rothschilds, she a Brazilian-born socialite. Their high life turned terrifyingly hardscrabble in the final years of the second world war: the story goes that Alec promised to buy Francine a house if they survived the Nazis, from whom they were hiding deep in the forests of the Spanish Pyrenees. Villa Santo Sospir, as it was eventually rechristened, was that house.
An early patron of Yves Saint Laurent who counted Hubert de Givenchy and Picasso in her social circle, Francine Weisweiller marshalled the talents of design legend Madeleine Castaing to decorate its rooms. Then, in 1950, she invited her friend Jean Cocteau down for a week from Paris; he gave Santo Sospir its soul. Cocteau lived at the villa on and off until 1963, during which period he wrote, made films and painted naïve renderings of mythological features on nearly every wall. (One lazy day, bored and “withering”, Cocteau impulsively drew an enormous head of Apollo, divinity emanating from it in exuberant waves, above the sitting-room fireplace. Weisweiller adored it and encouraged him to keep going.)
Francine died in 2003, bequeathing the villa to her daughter Carole, who struggled with inheritance taxes and upkeep, despite setting up a “friends of the villa” association and accepting by-appointment visitors for a fee. Cocteau’s “tattoos” began to fade, bubble and peel. Furniture sagged; upholstery was threadbare. The once-splendid garden was going to sauvage seed.
Enter Ilia Melia, a Georgian luxury property developer based in Monaco, who paid above the asking price to secure the villa’s status as a private residence in 2016.
“I wanted it to have a second life,” says Melia – focused and dauntingly fit, with an accent that toggles between Russian and Belmondo-esque French – of the property in which he lives with his wife and son for a few months a year. “It was one of those beautiful places, with an extraordinary history. Francine created the fantastic atmosphere that made people want to be here. They ate well, they slept well amid extraordinary beauty; they enjoyed these unique views and the gardens. That’s the direction it needed to return to.” As of this summer, the five-bedroom, four-bathroom Villa Santo Sospir will enter its second life, as a private rental available to let, complete with a chef, driver and two full-time housekeepers.
What’s fascinating is how wholly Melia, who builds eight-figure houses for a living (mostly the sort of turnkey travertine-and-sheet-glass showplaces that appeal to both Kuwaiti sheikhs and the tech bro-hood), has devoted himself to Santo Sospir’s historical and spiritual reanimation. “The idea was to keep all the period pieces – basically anything that was of historical value,” says Melia, down to a framed photo of Francine that still sits atop an original bridge table in the sitting room.
Everything has been restored, cleared or reconsidered. Melia drops a pile of bound documents onto the iconic Madeleine Castaing-designed cane table in the cane-clad dining room. They chronicle the restoration of Cocteau’s frescoes – scenes from Les Ballets Russes and Greek mythology on the walls; on the ceilings, decorative motifs, always with three parallel lines to delineate space (yet another story: Cocteau – who it is said convinced Louis Cartier to design the jewellery house’s famous Trinity ring, and wore two of them stacked on his pinkie finger – was transfixed by the number three). Underfloor heating has been installed, and the floors relaid exactly as was. New versions of the signature russet-red tiles have been precisely reproduced and put down where old, chipped and faded ones had been. Melia commissioned Marc Prigent – a protégé of Pierre-Yves Rochon, with whom he works – to design a small wing along the villa’s north façade, corresponding to the two storeys of the existent house. Above is a sun-saturated breakfast room; below, a more contemporary guest bedroom with access to the dining and pool terraces.
Only then did the soft renovation commence, taking another two years. For this, Melia enlisted Madison Cox and Jacques Grange. Both have personal connections to Santo Sospir, having inhabited the shaded area of the social Venn diagram created by Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé and Weisweiller mère in the ’70s and ’80s.
“My own story with [the villa] is part of my obsession with the decorative work of Jean Cocteau,” says Grange. “I was fortunate to meet Francine Weisweiller and become friends, and I have stayed in the house several times.” Melia recalls Grange telling him when he first proposed working together: “If you asked me to draw its layout this minute, I could do it for you.” Grange flew down from Paris a week later to meet him – “and it has been a collaboration from the very beginning”, says Grange.
Designer and owner each brought a strong vision. “The ambience Cocteau and Castaing created can’t be destroyed,” says Melia, gesturing to the flamboyant ceramics, primitive sculptures and ornate cabinets with cloisonné inlay in the dining room, where they compete for attention with Cocteau’s now immaculately restored tapestry depicting Judith slaying Holofernes. “You can’t come in with a heavy hand, or even really the intention to actually do a lot of decorating. We both understood that the interventions needed to be softer.”
Grange’s work is accordingly deft and appropriate to the last gesture. The bathrooms bear his signature detailing: stunning bookmatched marble floors, elegant chrome hardware. For the master bedroom, he commissioned a silk-wool rug in pale silver and powder blue that mimics, in reversed tones, the circle motif of Cocteau’s ceiling fresco. In one corner sits a chaise longue Castaing designed, faithfully recovered in its original chintz, which has been reproduced by Pierre Frey. Around Castaing’s dining table, meanwhile, the old rattan seating scheme has been replaced by a set of six Paolo Buffa Ondulations dining chairs, designed in 1950. (“We changed these chairs around a lot,” recalls Melia. “First Jacques brought his choice, but then didn’t like them. He did a huge survey selection of a lot of things; I think he wanted to take a bit of a risk, and do something very contemporary. But then we ended up with something not so different to the original.”)
It was Grange who proposed the landscaping be turned over to Cox, with whom he has collaborated for decades. Melia describes the state of the gardens as “a disaster” when they began work in 2022. Collaborating with Cox was, by contrast, “a pleasure from start to finish. I don’t think there’s a better landscape designer working today.” The entire hillside has been terraced, planted with quintessential Mediterranean flora mixed with handfuls of north African succulents and Indian and Asian exotics. Dizzyingly perfumed jasmine hedges line the descending drive, shaded on one side by two mature olives and a trio of elegant banana trees, pale-pink roses peeking from behind them. Below the house, along new paths that meander in long switchbacks down to the sea, cacti and prickly pear rise from amid stands of pungent rosemary.
When Villa Santo Sospir isn’t let to holidaymakers or occupied by Melia himself, he continues the tradition of accepting visitors; his sister Marina, the font of its history, usually hosts. It might be a design student, or group of heritage artisans; these are welcomed free of charge. Or it might be Bill Murray, Wes Anderson or Benedict Cumberbatch, all of whom dropped by last month during the Cannes Film Festival. Murray was so taken he came twice, bringing along Roman Coppola the second time. Such is the sway that singular beauty can wield, observes Melia. But the delight people still take in Santo Sospir is a powerful part of its legacy: “That is what makes the villa live.”
Villa Santo Sospir is available to let through Cedric Reversade and Paul-Maxime Koskas at Unique Properties & Events; enquire about dates and pricing at uniquepropertiesandevents.com
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