The Ultimate South of France Road Trip for Art and Design Lovers

I was barely an hour off the plane at the Nice Côte d’Azur Airport, and I was already surrounded by art. After a 20-minute drive up into the hills of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, I reached the Fondation Maeght, established by the art dealers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, who were inspired by Solomon R. Guggenheim’s museum in New York to open the property to the public in 1964 as the first private art institution in France. In the sculpture garden around the main building were masterpieces of 20th-century art by Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, and others.

The foundation, which opened an additional 5,000 square feet of galleries two years ago, was once an outlier in the South of France, but recently the region has become a magnet for travelers who prioritize culture over pool time. More artists and art patrons have shared their private worlds, more iconic homes have been restored to their former glory, and more personal collections have been opened to the public. I visited in the spring with a mission: to create the ultimate art and design road trip, featuring the many new attractions along the Riviera and in the speckled hills of Provence.

Fondation Maeght | Saint-Paul-de-Vence

The Eileen Gray house—officially Villa E-1027—is another excellent starting point. For many years, this experimental holiday home overlooking the sea in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin was abandoned to the elements; at one point, it was even occupied by squatters. Preservationists finally intervened in 1999, and it took more than 20 years of painstaking renovations before it finally opened to the public as a protected historic landmark. Today the modernist masterpiece remains much as Gray, a self-taught architect, originally envisioned it—as a gift for her lover, the fellow architect Jean Badovici. Their relationship ended shortly after construction finished, in 1929, and the property later went to Gray’s design rival, Le Corbusier, who, to her dismay, left his mark on the minimalist bungalow by adding colorful murals. He also built his own vacation home, Le Cabanon, next door.

Eileen Gray House | Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

From the Gray house, it’s a short drive to Menton, known for its distinctive sweet lemons and the legacy of Jean Cocteau. The polymath writer, artist, and filmmaker was a regular presence here toward the end of his life, and 15 years ago the town opened an imposing museum on the waterfront honoring him. Designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti, the striking black and white monolith was built specifically to house about 900 Cocteau pieces, collected by the late Belgian-American watch mogul Severin Wunderman and given to Menton as a donation. A freak storm that flooded and damaged the building in 2018 has left the collection in limbo, with the museum still closed for repairs eight years later and Wunderman’s heirs threatening to recall the gift. However, one can still see highlights this summer at a Cocteau exhibition in the ground-floor galleries of the nearby Palais de l’Europe, a municipal building in a former turn-of-the-20th-century casino. And a few blocks away, couples still exchange vows in Cocteau’s Chapelle Saint-Pierre, tucked inside Menton’s town hall, where he covered the walls and ceilings with his mythological murals and personally selected the leopard-print carpeting. The room is open to visitors when it’s not being used.

Chapelle Saint-Pierre | Villefranche-sur-Mer

Cocteau didn’t leave any work behind at his friend Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s home, La Pausa, up in the hills above Menton, although he was often a guest. Newly restored by architect Peter Marino and now owned by the fashion house that bears her name, the villa is once again a creative retreat, hosting writers and artists. Cocteau was also a frequent houseguest at heiress and art patron Francine Weisweiller’s Villa Santo Sospir, in nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. He “tattooed,” as he liked to say, the house’s walls and ceilings with frescoes; created mosaics for the patio; and shot scenes there for his 1960 film Testament of Orpheus. The property, also recently restored, is available for short-term rentals by request and is open to occasional visitors by appointment.

La Pausa | Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

Villa Santo Sospir | Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

Up the coast from Cannes, another iconic house with a rich history started welcoming special guests a few years ago, when art dealers Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt of Unit gallery, in London, launched a new art residency. Called Dragon Hill, it’s based in their 1960s “landscape house,” designed by Jacques Couëlle, a friend of Pablo Picasso’s and Salvador Dalí’s known for his organic forms and his work on the Hotel Cala di Volpe, in Sardinia. Couëlle was responsible for a whole collection of homes on the Riviera, in a gated enclave conceived as a haven for artists and collectors. Picasso, who produced a huge body of work in the region beginning in the 1940s, spent the last 12 years of his life nearby.

The residency’s director, Maxime Combot, showed me around one morning. Two artists who had been invited to spend a month there—Violeta Maya, from Madrid, and Marcus Cope, from London—were working side by side in a glass-box studio. Sculptures by Antony Gormley, Thomas Houseago, and Alicja Kwade, among other contemporary art stars, filled the gardens. The biomorphic curves of the house seemed to blend into the landscape.

Dragon Hill | Mouans-Sartoux

From Dragon Hill, it’s just an hour’s drive into the Var, where the Riviera meets Provence, above Saint-Tropez. The region has become an art-meets-nature destination in recent years, and the Commanderie de Peyrassol, a winery and vineyard with a sculpture park, a wooded guesthouse, and a restaurant, is an ideal base for exploring the area.

Commanderie de Peyrassol | Flassans-sur-Issole

It’s not far to the Venet Foundation, a pastoral art complex housed in an abandoned sawmill, with a waterfall flowing through the grounds. The 85-year-old French sculptor Bernar Venet moved there in 1989 in search of wide-open space, after many years in New York, where his circle of friends included Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Frank Stella, among other artists with whom he traded work.

Venet’s monumental Corten steel sculptures—variations on the public art he forges for parks and plazas—are scattered across the 17-acre site; his personal collection, also displayed, includes a James Turrell Skyspace open for stargazing one evening a week, a Frank Stella chapel featuring massive steel and aluminum sculptures, and a concrete staircase to nowhere by Sol LeWitt. Venet, who frequently hosts exhibitions of artists he admires, is showcasing Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light works this summer.

Venet Foundation | Le Muy

Back on the coast, Villa Carmignac is another stunning addition to the cultural landscape. It was launched by financier and art collector Édouard Carmignac in 2018, on the sparsely populated island of Porquerolles. After a quick ferry ride from the Giens Peninsula to the island’s sailboat-filled marina, it’s a 15-minute hike to the former farmhouse, set on 37 acres, with 21,000 square feet of exhibition space. New temporary exhibitions are installed each summer, including this year’s “Sea, Pop & Sun” show, which pairs Pop art from the 1960s and ’70s with contemporary artists such as Derrick Adams and Judy Chicago. More permanent monumental installations fill the gardens, designed by landscape architect Louis Benech, who revamped the Tuileries in Paris. They include the four gigantic, glowering heads of Ugo Rondinone’s Four Seasons; Ed Ruscha’s art billboard, Sea of Desire, looms over an abandoned tennis court.

Villa Carmignac | Île de Porquerolles

It’s easy to spend an entire day here, lounging on the pebbly beaches after you’ve had your fill of art. You might, however, need a couple of days to fully experience the region’s most immersive art and design destination, Château La Coste. Perched above Aix-en-Provence, not far from Paul Cézanne’s farmhouse studio, it features pavilions designed by prizewinning architects such as Renzo Piano, Tadao Ando, and Jean Nouvel; a trove of outdoor sculptures from leading contemporary artists; six restaurants; two hotels; and a winery and vineyards.

Originally a classic Provençal wine estate, Château La Coste has become an important stop on the European art circuit since the Irish hotelier Paddy McKillen and his sister Mara acquired it in 2002, with an exhibition calendar rivaling those of top museums in Paris or London. In July, husband-and-wife artists Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian are cocurating a show of their friends’ work in a Richard Rogers pavilion, and displaying their own work elsewhere on the property. A Julian Schnabel retrospective also runs through mid-August.

Château La Coste | Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

An hour due west, in Arles, it’s hard to overstate the impact that the philanthropic art patron Maja Hoffmann has had on the city, best known for its well-preserved Roman arena. It’s been more than a decade since Hoffmann, an heir to the Hoffmann–La Roche pharmaceutical fortune, began transforming an abandoned rail yard into a cultural complex with a mirrored tower by Frank Gehry. Train depots were turned into galleries and performance spaces by architect Annabelle Selldorf, and a new public park was designed by landscape architect Bas Smets. This year’s rich summer program includes an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs and performances by Patti Smith.

LUMA Arles | Arles

Hoffmann’s LUMA, which has no permanent collection, serves as both a museum and a hub for emerging ideas, with its own research center that has transformed local resources such as sea salt and algae into building materials (used in Gehry’s tower and elsewhere on the property). Beyond the 27-acre cultural campus, Hoffmann has invested in Arles itself. She owns four art-filled hotels, along with the region’s top restaurant, La Chassagnette, and an artisanal bakery, Le Sauvage. She is president of the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, which runs a museum in town (the artist spent one very productive year here in the 1880s, creating more than 300 works), and has also inspired other figures in the art world to lay down roots in the area.

This summer, Fonds Bustamante, a new foundation from French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante, opens inside the former Sainte-Croix church, renovated by Parisian architect Charles Zana and featuring a tile frieze by the artist on the building’s facade. For the inaugural show, Bustamante, a photographer, sculptor, and painter—and former director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, in Paris—is pairing his work with that of Thomas Schütte, Cristina Iglesias, and Franz West, among others. Nearby, South Korean minimalist master Lee Ufan, who remains highly productive at 90, opened Lee Ufan Arles four years ago in a historic mansion redesigned by his friend Tadao Ando. Ufan’s Zen sculptures and abstract paintings occupy two floors of the 14,500-square-foot space; the third floor is reserved for temporary exhibitions, such as a presentation of award-winning director Park Chan-wook’s rarely seen photographs, on view in July.

Lee Ufan Arles
Arles

If Ufan’s sparsely appointed space reflects his pared-down aesthetic, Anselm Kiefer’s estate, La Ribaute, in the foothills of the Massif Central mountains, showcases a much more frenetic artistic style. Outside the medieval village of Barjac, the German artist has spent more than 30 years transforming the landscape around an abandoned silk mill into a complete work of art, creating hills, lakes, tunnels, and caves. His apocalyptic, towering structures made of recycled shipping containers are scattered throughout the 200-acre property, which opened to visitors four years ago.

La Ribaute
Barjac

A final word of advice: Plan ahead. These art-world marvels are not looking to compete with the hypercharged Club 55 champagne and chaise longues scene, but don’t expect to simply saunter in. Much like the Riviera’s hottest beaches, hotels, and restaurants, some of them are often booked weeks in advance. Bon courage!