Cool Kids Are Into Art: A South of France Guide

The South of France has always attracted people who take beauty seriously. From the early 20th century onward, artists came here for the light. Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Chagall, Cocteau: all of them worked, lived, and left incredible works after them. What follows is a guide of my favourite spots worth checking out.

1. Fondation Maeght

Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence may be the finest small art foundation in the world. Opened in 1964 by dealer couple Aimé and Marguerite Maeght and designed by architect Josep Lluís Sert, it sits in the hills above the village and feels like the landscape and the art have always been the same thing. The Giacometti courtyard, the Miró labyrinth, the Braque mosaic pool and chapel, Calder mobiles turning in the pine-scented air: it feels like a dream.

2. La Colombe d’Or

The story of La Colombe d’Or is simple and almost too good to be true. The Roux family, who have run this inn in Saint-Paul-de-Vence since the 1920s, once accepted paintings in lieu of payment from artists who couldn’t afford their bill. The artists in question included Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Miró, and Calder. The paintings are still there, hanging on the walls of the restaurant and the bar, next to which you will eat your lunch. The iconic pool is one of the most photographed on the Riviera.

3. Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

Béatrice de Rothschild built her rose-pink villa on the narrowest point of the Cap Ferrat peninsula between 1905 and 1912, and she did not do it quietly. The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild contains one of the most significant private art collections assembled in the Belle Époque period. Outside, nine gardens (French, Florentine, Spanish, Japanese, Provençal) are laid out across the hillside. It is eccentric, obsessive, and… pink!

4. Villa Santo Sospir

In 1950, Jean Cocteau was invited by his patron Francine Weisweiller to stay at her villa on Cap Ferrat. Unable to leave a surface undecorated, he covered the walls, ceilings, and fireplaces of Villa Santo Sospir with murals drawn directly onto the plaster in a total environment he called “the tattooed villa.” It hosted many iconic visitors, including Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder. Romy Schneider and Alain Delon spent their first romantic weekend here. The villa will soon open again after a thoughtful restoration.

5. Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc

Nothing on the Côte d’Azur commands the same place in the collective imagination as Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Perched on the legendary Cap d’Antibes since 1870, it has welcomed everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, alongside generations of the world’s most celebrated and affluent figures. Its iconic tennis court, tucked among fragrant Mediterranean gardens, is as storied as the hotel itself. More than a Riviera landmark, Eden-Roc remains the benchmark against which every luxury hotel on the coast is measured and, more than a century and a half later, it still sets the standard.

6. Château La Coste

Just outside Aix-en-Provence, Château La Coste is the rare place where world-class contemporary art, architecture, and winemaking exist in perfect harmony. Conceived by a visionary collector, the estate has become an open-air museum shaped by some of the most influential creative minds of our time, including Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Louise Bourgeois, and Lee Ufan. As you wander through vineyards, olive groves, and fields of lavender, monumental artworks and architectural interventions emerge unexpectedly from the landscape. More than a winery, Château La Coste is a journey through art, architecture, and nature, where every turn reveals a new dialogue between culture and landscape.

7. Le Palais Bulles

Pierre Cardin bought an unfinished experiment in organic architecture above Théoule-sur-Mer in the 1990s and turned it into one of the most extraordinary private residences in existence. Le Palais Bulles was designed by Hungarian architect Antti Lovag in the 1970s with no straight lines, no right angles, only interconnected spherical rooms carved into the cliff face above the sea. Cardin hosted fashion shows here for decades. It is now used for events and opens occasionally for visits, worth planning around.

8. La Chapelle Matisse

Henri Matisse called the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence his masterpiece, which is a significant claim from an artist of his stature. Built between 1948 and 1951 as a gift to the Dominican sisters who had nursed him during a serious illness, he designed everything: the acid-yellow, emerald-green, and cobalt-blue stained glass windows, the black-line ceramic tile murals of St. Dominic and the Virgin and Child, the vestments, the altar. Matisse was 80 when it was completed and considered it the culmination of a life’s work.

9. Villa Kérylos

Théodore Reinach was a classical scholar, archaeologist, and member of one of France’s great intellectual dynasties, and between 1902 and 1908 he built himself an ancient Greek house on the rocky promontory of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, designed by architect Emmanuel Pontremoli and furnished entirely to period. Reinach lived in it seasonally for the rest of his life, wearing a tunic and adopting Greek customs indoors. The result is one of the strangest and most beautiful interiors on the Riviera: mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a marble bath fed by the sea, every room opening onto light and water.

10. Château de la Messardière

Saint-Tropez in season is an exercise in sensory overload, and Château de la Messardière is where you go when you want to be above it, literally. The 19th-century neo-Gothic château sits on a hilltop with views over the bay and the town below. The pool is the thing — perched on the hillside with the bay stretched out below it, the kind of view that makes you forget you were ever anywhere else. The art collection throughout the property is considered, the terrace at sunset, the bay turning gold and the Maures hills behind, is the image you came to the South of France to find.

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