Artists, Architecture, Beaches. This French Town Has it All, Except Crowds.
On a hot Sunday morning in July, my sister Adèle and I walked through the narrow entrance to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, the beautiful French medieval town perched above the sea and lying almost midway between Marseilles to the west and St.-Tropez to the east. We were en route to meet Jean-Pierre Blanc, the director of the villa, for a tour around the extraordinary Modernist house, designed by the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in the early 1920s.
I had long wanted to visit Hyères to see the concrete-and-glass house. It was commissioned by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, a superbly glamorous, deep-pocketed aristocratic pair who were friends and patrons of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray (who immortalized the villa in his 1929 film, 'Mystères du Château de Dé') and seemingly every other member of the early 20th-century avant-garde.
So when I heard that a Parisian acquaintance had moved to the town, and was renting out rooms in a lovely house she had bought almost next door to the Villa Noailles, I immediately booked for my husband and myself, suggesting to Adele that she join us.
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