It is the place where Salvador Dalí painted The Enigma of Hitler, a haunting landscape featuring a giant telephone receiver that seems to be crying a tear over a cutout picture of the Fuhrer. Conceived in 1939, the work seems to anticipate war. It is also the place where Winston Churchill penned parts of his multi-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and painted its dappled-light view. Somerset Maugham would visit, too, as well as novelist Colette, composer Igor Stravinsky and playwright Jean Cocteau, partaking in lunches that lasted all day and night, with debates and discussions around artistic ideas.
This place is La Pausa: the Mediterranean villa in the hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, once owned by husband-and-wife writing duo Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson, followed by French fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who had it rebuilt from scratch at the end of the 1920s. She later sold it to an American publishing couple, Emery and Wendy Reves.
Sprawling yet monastic, the white-walled house – with blue shutters and black crittall windows clustered in groups of five in homage to Chanel’s No 5 – has just been restored to its original specification, after being bought back by the luxury fashion brand in 2015. Architect Peter Marino studied countless photographs to get it right: from the concrete squares that sit in a quilt-like grid atop the lawn, to the potted cacti at the foot of the staircase. Original bedframes were bought, too, as well as the installation of an entirely mirrored bathroom, not unlike the one at 31 Rue Cambon, Coco’s address in Paris.
Revived … La Pausa, the Mediterranean villa in the hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in 2025. Photograph: Jason Schmidt/Chanel
But when you’re restoring a place with such a rich past, how do you capture its spirit and honour its history, bringing to life the words and minds of its illustrious guests to create the most multi-layered portrait of all? Simple. You build a library.
Bookshelves are, after all, a record of the knowledge, characters and ideas that have swirled around someone’s mind, reflecting their interests, desires, and – often in the case of artists or writers – their friends. Whenever I go to an artist’s studio, or visit someone’s house, I am always intrigued about what lives on their shelves – especially if the writers are no longer alive. It’s an intimate way to get to know someone. It deepens our understanding of them, gives us access to their interior worlds, takes us to places we didn’t know they’d been to.
I remember visiting Alice Neel’s Manhattan apartment and seeing her many books on topics that ranged from socialism to psychoanalysis. And Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City home was filled with texts on Buddhism, magic, Celtic history, as well as books on loneliness.
‘We believe the future is made with fragments of the past’ … La Pausa’s library after Peter Marino’s restoration. Photograph: Jason Schmidt/Chanel
But what if someone’s library could continue to grow after they had gone? Had the residents of La Pausa lived on, what books would they continue to read, and how might we perceive them in the present day?
This was the challenge set by Chanel during the restoration, aided by the specialist booksellers at Hatchards in London (where Coco’s lover, the Duke of Westminster, had an account) and 7L in Paris. Given a list of 100 books that Chanel was known to have cherished and read, the team set about choosing titles in line with her scholarship. But they also wanted to create a broader portrait of her friends and interests, and who and what passed through La Pausa. “And what has happened since, across music, architecture and fiction,” says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel.
Entering the wood-panelled library was like stepping into the minds and worlds of those who stood there before me. Adorning the shelves were biographies of Picasso by John Richardson, rare editions of Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, dust jackets designed by Vanessa Bell for her sister Virginia Woolf’s book, The Waves; plus first editions of those who frequented the French Riviera, such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. There were also books by (or about) guests who visited the villa, from Somerset Maugham to Greta Garbo, as well as glimpses into their private worlds, with the bounded volumes of Jean Cocteau’s letters.
Salvador Dalí at La Pausa in the 1930s. Photograph: Photo Wolfgang Vennemann/ Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí/ADAGP, Paris
“We believe the future is made with fragments of the past,” says Peel, which is why the library is also brought up to date with works by Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk. To make it even more contemporary, says Peel, “as our guests come to visit, they will leave their own books”.
Standing back and admiring the library as a whole, you sense a sprawling web of artists who worked, conversed, inspired and consumed each other’s works – directly and indirectly – across centuries. And at its centre was a woman who shaped, and is still shaping, culture today. But why would a library be important to her?
Books were the very medium Coco harnessed to escape from her hard and humble beginnings. Aged 11, she was left parentless after her mother died of tuberculosis and her father abandoned his daughters at an orphanage run by Cistercian nuns at the abbey of Aubazine. Never with much money, she found canny ways to access books: “I read everything … We never bought books at home; we cut out the serial from the newspaper and we sewed together long sheets of yellow paper. That’s what little Coco lapped up in secret … I copied down whole passages from novels … [they] taught me about life.”
Coco Chanel at La Pausa in 1938. Photograph: Roger Schall/ Schall Collection
Books were a place of refuge, a conduit for Coco to dream about being the heroine in her own fabulous tale and imagine countless other lives for herself. One has to remember how difficult it would have been for her as a woman to build an empire from scratch, decades before women even got the vote in France. It would have required huge amounts of imagination and storytelling. As she said: “Books have been my best friends.”
So when it came to restoring La Pausa, the library was to be its beating heart and pensive mind, the place that held everything together. In many ways, aren’t all of our bookshelves? They reflect back to us what we’ve done, learned, and have stored inside of us; who we’ve met (sometimes literally as well as imaginatively) and how we’ve escaped. As with Neel’s and Carrington’s, they reveal our curiosities, secrets and desires. Memory palaces housing our sprawling inner worlds, they can be the most intimate portraits of all. Take a look at your own bookshelves and ask: “What do they say about me?”
