La Pausa

La Pausa is a large villa above the village of Roquebrune, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, with views toward Menton and Monaco. It was built in the early 1930s for the fashion designer Coco Chanel, who bought the land in February 1929 and had the house finished within a year, to a design by the architect Robert Streitz that drew on a twelfth century convent and orphanage, with a stone staircase, a cloistered courtyard, and repeated arched windows said to echo the number five of Chanel No. 5. Chanel sold the villa in 1953 to the Hungarian born publisher Emery Reves, whose guests included Winston Churchill in the late 1950s, and Reves's widow Wendy lived there until 2007. Chanel repurchased the property in 2015, and after a restoration by the architect Peter Marino it is now used as a creative retreat for artists and writers.