The Houses That
Art Built

(Artist Residences) Stepping into the homes left behind by artists from another era is its own kind of transport. In such places, the romance of everyday life is visible through objects arranged just so, through the colors and works on the wall, the path of a garden, the framing of a view. They are spaces that reveal not only how people lived, but who they longed to be. They remind us that a house can be more than shelter. It can be a lens, a manifesto, a world unto itself. Maison Ë´s grand tour leads us through five Mediterranean residences where art and life once intertwined—and where traces of both still linger.

A villa assembled from Roman ruins. A crimson cube built by a provocative writer. A Provençal inn turned accidental museum. A couture retreat with convent bones. A surrealist’s hideaway turned artist residency. Each contains a different version of a life devoted to ideas—and of what remains long after the residents are gone.

High above the Bay of Naples, Villa San Michele stands on the northern cliffs of Capri. Swedish physician and author Axel Munthe began building the house at the turn of the 20th century, using Roman ruins and salvaged fragments to realize his dream of a place “open to sun and wind and the voice of the sea.”

The villa became an intricate expression of his worldview—a synthesis of medicine, mysticism, and aesthetics. Munthe curated a remarkable collection that spans Egyptian, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities, including a 3,200-year-old red granite sphinx that presides over the garden’s balustrade. The garden itself is a carefully composed ascent, thick with wisteria, citrus, cypress, and vine, designed not to dominate nature but to accompany it. The house and its collection became the subject of The Story of San Michele, an international bestseller once optioned for a film that never materialized. Today, visitors can explore the villa and its grounds, and the sense lingers that this was less a home than an offering to light, sky, and time.

On the opposite side of the island, Casa Malaparte perches above the sea on Punta Massullo, its geometric form laid against raw limestone cliffs. It was conceived in the 1930s by the writer Curzio Malaparte—born Kurt Erich Suckert—a war veteran, political chameleon, and provocateur who wanted a house that reflected no style but his own. “Casa come me,” he called it—a house like me.

Originally designed in collaboration with Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera, the final result is largely credited to Malaparte, who abandoned the plans and oversaw construction himself. The house is defined by its flat roof accessed via a dramatic external staircase and by its irregular interiors: a voluminous living room, a severe dining space, and windows set at varying sizes to frame the sea.

Malaparte lived there until his death in 1957. In the decades that followed, the house fell into disrepair, battered by the elements and neglect. It was carefully restored in the 1980s and 1990s by his great-nephew Niccolò Rositani and today remains in private hands, maintained by Malaparte’s descendants. Though not open to the public, the house occasionally reappears in fashion shoots and special projects—most famously in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris, which cemented the casa’s place in cinematic history and gave it a new afterlife. That same spirit resurfaced in Karl Lagerfeld’s 1997 photo series and Jacquemus’s 2024 runway show, both drawn to its stark geometry and romantic pull—a silhouette that endures as a symbol of Mediterranean modernism.

Tucked within the medieval hilltop village of Saint-Paul de Vence on the Côte d’Azur, La Colombe d’Or opened in the 1920s as a three-room inn with simple Provençal fare and a view over the valley. By the 1940s, it had quietly transformed into an accidental museum. Artists fleeing occupied Paris—Braque, Léger, Calder, Chagall—arrived with little more than paint and charm, offering canvases in place of cash. Paul Roux, the inn’s founder and an amateur painter himself, took them in and hung the works without ceremony.

Picasso lunched here. So did James Baldwin. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre were known to take a room. An outsized Calder mobile now hovers above the pool, gently turning in the afternoon breeze. A Léger mural of the inn’s namesake dove watches from the terrace. In the dining room, the walls are lined with original works by Matisse, Delaunay and others, still part of the everyday mise-en-scène—bouillabaisse, chilled rosé, a game of cards. The rooms remain modest—whitewashed walls, creaky floorboards, and four-poster beds—but the ghosts are not. In the 1960s, several paintings were stolen from the dining room; Chagall’s was left behind. He reportedly fumed, “I’m a big-time artist! Why not mine?” New works still arrive—a ceramic by Sean Scully now rests poolside. The Roux family continues to keep the place as it always was: discreet, unpretentious and flush with charm. The hand-painted sign by the gate says it all: Ici on loge à cheval, à pied ou en peinture—lodging for those on horseback, on foot, or with a painting in hand.

Further east, perched on a jasmine-scented hill in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Villa La Pausa looks out across the sea and olive groves stretching toward Monaco and the Italian border. Built in 1928 by Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, the house was conceived as a refuge from the machinery of her fame. Designed by Robert Streitz, its architecture echoed the monastic clarity of her youth, with a cloistered patio and a staircase modelled after the one at Aubazine, the convent-orphanage where she came of age.

For a decade, La Pausa became a gathering place for Chanel’s inner circle. Dalí and Gala stayed in the guesthouse beside the chapel. Misia Sert played the piano in the mauve velvet salon. Christian Bérard danced barefoot on Persian rugs. Chanel’s days followed their own pace: late mornings behind closed doors, long lunches of roast beef and wit, afternoons of tennis or rest beneath olive branches, evenings at the table beneath hanging lights. Chanel often remained standing, a hand in her pocket, relaying stories with cutting charm and unmistakable command.

When Coco Chanel sold the house in 1953, it passed through other hands. Wendy Reves remodeled the bedroom; the furniture was scattered. Chanel—the company—reacquired the villa in 2015 and under architect Peter Marino’s direction, it has been meticulously restored. The original gilded headboard was recovered, Coco’s ivory quilt replicated, and the house now looks as if the legendary designer had just stepped out into the garden. Today part of the Chanel Culture Fund, La Pausa hosts artists and writers once again. It is not open to the public and it is not a hotel. Guests are few, residencies rare. But the intention remains: to offer space for work, thought, and conversation. A house built for stillness between chapters—once again, in many ways, exactly that.

Inland to the west, in the Luberon village of Ménerbes, a pale stone townhouse clings to the hillside, looking out over vines and lavender fields. It was here, in 1944, that Dora Maar—artist, surrealist, and one-time muse of Picasso—sought refuge after the end of their turbulent affair. Purchased with her own money, the 18th-century house became Maar’s sanctuary, far from the salons and shadows of Paris where she’d long been cast in supporting roles.

Maar came every summer, staying for months at a time. She painted, gardened, and wandered the cobbled lanes alone, keeping the curtains drawn and the world at a distance. In Ménerbes, she was no longer the weeping woman of Picasso’s canvases but a figure reclaimed on her own terms—introspective and deliberately out of view. After her death in 1997, the house passed into the hands of Nancy Brown Negley, a Texan arts patron who recognized its strange, charged aura. Rather than turn it into a shrine, she restored it and opened its doors again—this time, to other artists. Since 2007, the Dora Maar Cultural Center has steadily hosted writers, composers, scholars, and painters for residencies in a setting fine-tuned for introspection. The interior retains its patina: high ceilings, timeworn tiles, tall windows cracked open to the scent of thyme and pine. Just down the street, the Hôtel de Tingry—an 18th-century mansion and historical monument—was added to the institution in 2020, extending its reach and opening more space for ideas to thrive.