Up for sale: Pierre Cardin’s surprising and avant-garde holiday home
In 1992, French couturier Pierre Cardin, who passed away late last year, bought a large dusty pink house located on the slopes of the Estérel mountains in the south of France. Dubbed ‘The Bubble Palace’, it was created by anti-conformist architect and ‘habitologist’, Antti Lovag.
Perched on the slopes of the rocky red mountains of the Estérel, in the village of Théoule-sur-Mer, a place on the French Riviera of about 1,500 inhabitants, ‘le Palais Bulles’, aka the Bubble Palace, stands, its pink curvaceous rooms surrounded by maritime pines and palm trees, with panoramic views over the Mediterranean Sea.
The house is for sale, , and has been for a little while, for – according to the Smith Journal – a whopping €350-million (about R6.2-billion), although the real estate agency in charge of selling the property lists it under “price upon request”. It is 1,200m² of rooms shaped like bubbles, ponds, waterfalls, an infinity pool, and even a 500-person open-air amphitheatre, all on top of more than 8,500m² of land.
Inside, it’s all curves, arches and portholes, infused with matching pop sixties-like décor: circular beds with plump duvets and matching pillows in silk forest green or petrol blue; here, an Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chair-inspired lounger; there, Lytegem lookalike lamps, looking almost like round telescopes in bright metallic colours that pivot on their heads.
The home was that of Pierre Cardin, the French-Italian couturier, art enthusiast and collector, and frantic licenser of his eponymous brand (he once famously said: “I have a name, I have to take advantage of it.”). He bought it in 1992 as a holiday home, the perfect – and somehow impeccably fitting – house to his own fashion collections and an escape from Paris. Cardin was considered, along with André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, the precursor of ‘la mode futuriste’, a deliberate ultramodern style that contrasted with what was seen and created at the time. In 1954, he designed the ‘robe bulle’ – the bubble dress – a dress that would blow up around the hips, like a balloon tied at the waist and closing on the calves. It was strange, different and the press loved it. The bubble dress launched his career as a couturier. In his Palais Bulles of Pierre Cardin, published by Assouline, the couturier said: “From the start of my career, the circle has been a constant in my creations; I wanted to be promoting the unusual.”
Ironically, even though the Palais Bulle seems to echo Cardin’s design work, the house wasn’t his own creation; commissioned in 1975 by French industrialist Pierre Bernard and built by Hungarian architect Antti Lovag, the house was completed in 1989.
Lovag, who had already constructed a ‘bubble’ house for fund manager Antoine Gaudet in 1968, was interested in the practical form, the shell and “a change in perspective”; and he challenged the usual linear and angular shapes in vogue in architecture. Instead, the architect, who preferred to call himself a ‘habitologist’ (in charge of the habitat and not the structure), looked first at the landscape and nature of a place and then superimposed his ideas – half eggs glued next to each other – on top of it.
Of his work, Lovag was quoted as saying: “I’ve always worked with adventurers who wanted something that didn’t exist,” adding: “These are my conditions:
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take, I don’t know what it will become and I don’t know how much it will cost.”
In a retrospective video done by Maison Bernard, Lovag is seen working (and living) on site, watching every step of the building process with the attention of a parent.
He would build an “iron rebar network that enabled him to visualise the interior spaces and define the openings to the sky, the sea or landscapes” says Maison Bernard. And then, just like the cast used for a broken leg, he would pour concrete on to the frame, creating houses that looked at once part of the environment, and extraordinary and unexpected designs in an otherwise uniform architecture.
The result was a house like a cocoon, an exaggerated beehive with alcoves and caves to escape and disappear.
Cardin fell in love with the place and from parties to fashion shows to movie sets, the house became not only a refuge for the designer but also a popular backdrop for glamorous shoots.
But it was expensive to maintain and in the end, not easy to live in; in a February 2021 article for AD (Architectural Digest) magazine, Hugh Wade-Jones, managing director of Enness Global Mortgages, explains: “The Palais Bulles is undoubtedly an iconic piece of real estate; however, the predominant opinion is that the property is a bit of a white elephant. It’s architecturally incredible but largely impractical for residential living and would require a huge amount of work to remedy that.”
Still, AD writer Nadja Sayej notes that “Cardin would rent it out to vacation groups for $33,200 a day (R490,000)”.
Extravagant maintenance costs and
unusual homes seemed to be in Cardin’s caractère; nine years after he bought the Bubble Palace, he bought the 15th century Château de Lacoste, originally the home of the infamous libertine, the Marquis de Sade, also in the south of France. When he bought the castle, it was a ruin with an open-air amphitheatre and a view over the Lubéron valley and the village of Bonnieux. Now, every year, it boasts a theatre, dance and opera festival, and people can visit the place during the summer.
“The dress is a vase which the body follows. My clothes are like modules in which bodies move,” said Cardin. And so are his homes – modules in which he moved, at once original, modern and visionary.