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.
Villa Santo Sospir’s master bedroom with a custom rug designed by Jacques Grange to echo the geometric motifs on the ceiling, handpainted by Jean Cocteau © Stefan Giftthaler
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.
