Villa Nellcôte in the south of France was the exotic location where the Rolling Stones recorded Exile On Main Street.
Commissioned in 1854 by a businessman named Eugene Thomas, in 1971 Villa Nellcôte, in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte D’Azur was the temporary residence of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, his partner Anita Pallenberg and their son, Marlon. Upstairs, a beautiful entourage socialised, often illicitly. In Nellcôte’s many-roomed basement, The Rolling Stones recorded material for what became their most storied album.
“It’s got a raw sound quality, and the reason for that is that the basement was very dingy and very damp,” says Mick Taylor, Stones lead guitarist for the five years between 1969 and 1974. “The roof leaked and there were power failures. We had to deal with all that, and go with the flow.”
The flow to which Taylor refers was the fragrant drifting in and out of some of the era’s most interesting characters. Musicians like Bobby Keys, the sax player who taught Keith Richards the pleasures of throwing furniture out of windows. Drug dealers like Tommy Weber, who arrived with his children, and a plentiful supply of cocaine. Glamorous friends like Stash Klossowski, son of the painter Balthus. There were record execs, family members, groupies, wasters and journalists.
For all the relaxed atmosphere at Nellcôte, it was, however, pragmatic business practice that had taken the Stones to the south of France. With the disaster of the 1969 Altamont free concert behind them, the band had spent the previous 18 months putting their affairs in order.
“It was an impressive house,” remembers Andy Johns, who engineered and mixed Exile. “Somewhat baroque. The heating vents on the floor were gold swastikas. Keith told me that it had been a Gestapo headquarters in the war. But he told me, ‘It’s OK. We’re here now.’
While the band continued their intermittent recording, the days at Nellcôte passed in a slow, dazed enchantment. To pass the time, Andy Johns and horn player Jim Price set up a casino in their own villa. A guy lived on the front lawn, in a tepee. “There wasn’t really any pattern, that wasn’t the way they rolled,” says Gretchen Carpenter. “If the kids wouldn’t sleep, we’d take them out in a speedboat ride to Monte Carlo. We’d have cocktails, and the kids would fall asleep on the way. It was the most perfect summer, but everything seemed to go wrong after that.”
Today, the most famous house in Villfranche-sur-Mer remains cloaked in mystery. While making the documentary Stones In Exile, director Stephen Kijak asked to visit Nellcôte, but the current owners declined to let their property be filmed. In a way, it’s a fitting end to this chapter in the Exile On Main St story. Everyone has their own take on what one might be going on inside. The truth, though, is behind closed doors.
source: The Guardian
Post by Coco Pastis
Captured in the heat of the moment, surrounded by their tools and work, these Italian sculptors were photographed by Gianfranco Moroldo and Duilio Pallotelli for L’Europeo 1960. In 2010 the magazine re-published these images as they are part of the Italian artistic heritage.
Source: Sighs and Whispers
Post by Coco Pastis
Check out the amazing documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter, about Charles and Ray Eames. Its a fascinating look into the evolution of their designs and the process behind their collaboration. The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames were America’s most influential and important industrial designers. Admired for their creations and fascinating as individuals, they have risen to iconic status in American culture. ‘Eames: The Architect & The Painter’ draws from a treasure trove of archival material, as well as new interviews with friends, colleague, and experts to capture the personal story of Charles and Ray while placing them firmly in the context of their fascinating times.
Source: Vena Cava
Post by Coco Pastis
Egon von Fürstenberg or Prince Egon of Fürstenberg was a fashion designer who wrote two books about the power look for men. His first book – The Power Look, a guide to fashion and good taste – is fashion oriented, the second one – The Power Look at Home: Decorating for Men – translated his idea of the powerful, fashionable man into home interiors. From black leather, wood, lots of spiky plants and designer chairs, everything oozes masculinity and elegance.
Source: Wikipedia
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Last week the village of Hyères at the French Riviera hosted the 27th International Festival of Fashion & Photography. In the impressive decor of the Villa Noailles young artist pave their way to international succes. It’s a very avant garde festival, a bohemian home where trends are set, where open minds come together to look at the future. No better location than this one, visited by many great names.
Villa Noailles is an early modernist house, built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, between 1923 and 1927. It is located in the hills above Hyères, in the Var, southeastern France.
Charles de Noailles was born in 1891, and his wife Marie-Laure was born in 1902. They were married in 1923. Before their marriage, they became friends of artist-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Noailles commissioned a portrait of his wife by Pablo Picasso in 1923.
In 1923, they signed a contract with the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to build a summer villa in the hills above the city of Hyères. Construction was underway for three years, and eventually also included a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the couple were important patrons of modern art, particularly surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel; and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures by Balthus, Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuşi, Miró, and Dora Maar. Villa Noailles features prominently in Man Ray’s film Les Mystères du Château de Dé.
Source: The Red List
Post by Coco Pastis
We’re always looking forward to a new issue of Apartemento. This issue of everyone’s favorite everyday life interiors magazine includes the first Apartamento Fiction Supplement featuring Jocko Weyland, Amanda Maxwell, and our London fave Conor Donlon. Keep a look out for some familiar LA faces!
Featuring: Tierney Gearon, Duncan Fallowell, Yrjö Kukkapuro, Conor Donlon, Nanos Valaoritis,Tomás Nervi, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Jean Abou, Li Edelkoort, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nic & Jackie Harrison, Gonzalo Milà, Jordi Labanda, Jem Goulding, Ramdane Touhami, Chris Johanson & Jo Jackson, BOPBAA, José León Cerrillo, India Salvor Menuez, Nicolas Congé & Camille Berthomier, Henry Roy, Jeff Rian, Max Lamb, Reg Mombassa
Plus: a fiction supplement by Jocko Weyland and Amanda Maxwell
source: Apartamento
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These pictures were taken in “The Stork” villa in Ostend, Belgium. Architect and furniture designer Joseph De Bruycker from Roeselare, Belgium was influenced by the cubist style of the Dutch architect Willem Dudok.
The house he designed for Dr. Camiel Depuydt is typical of the interwar progressive architecture that reflected the international “modern style”. The architect designed a concept that incorporated the doctor office and living quarters. The whole is a combination of geometric volumes.
The external design continues in the interior (also designed by The Bruycker) and in the garden. “The Stork” is the result of of an extraordinary cooperation and interaction between the client and the architect. This protected monument is currently on the market.
source: Architecten Woningen
Post by Coco Pastis
LIFE magazine’s Gjon Mili, a technical prodigy and lighting innovator, visited Pablo Picasso in the South of France in 1949. The meeting of these two marvelous minds and sensibilities was bound to result in something extraordinary. Mili showed the artist some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, jumping in the dark — and Picasso’s lively mind began to race.
“Picasso gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment,” LIFE wrote in its January 30, 1950, issue in which the images shown here first appeared. He was so fascinated by the results that he posed for five sessions.”
This series of photographs, known ever since as Picasso’s “light drawings,” were made with a small electric light in a darkened room; in effect, the images vanished as soon as they were created — and yet they still live, six decades later, in Mili’s playful, hypnotic images. Many of them were also put on display in early 1950 in a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Finally, while the “Picasso draws a centaur in the air” photo that leads off this gallery is rightly celebrated, many of the images in this gallery are far less well-known — but no less thrilling.
Source: LIFE magazine
Post by Coco Pastis
When a collection of furniture reminds you of the hit 1980s game show, Blockbusters, you know you’re onto a winner.
But the Rayuela stools from Spanish furniture designers Alvaro Catalan de Ocon, are of course so much more than that.
A repeated tile pattern is what makes these pieces so successful as the designs can be infinitely produced. Using the humble rhombus as a starting shape, three are combined to make a hexagon which, according to Alvaro Catalan de Ocon, is the best way to cover an area.
Matt surfaces with textured grain work extremely well together, with the designer’s mixing waxed oak, walnut and maple to form this unusual, graphic optical effect due to the different colours. As a single stool or a tessellated collection of them, they’re strong simpleness demonstrates why the range is at Milan this year.
source: It’s Nice That
post by Coco Pastis
This project has been realized in a neighborhood, Antony in Paris, France that is an example of the belief that architecture, whether heterogeneous and homogeneous, is shaped by outdated zoning regulations. The delays in securing permits, along with conditions of the urban situation and our desire to continue and refine our own research on wood constructions, led us to propose a type of construction system.
This type is still not released in urban areas and rather reserved for detached houses in less dense sites. The urban rules and the site context, which is very typical, have suggested the template, which has proved a real asset to the project.
Completely built in wood panels placed on a pedestal (the ground here is very bad), the house is completely prefabricated in a workshop and delivered to the site to be finally assembled in just two weeks. This is a building system in Finnish wood panels that come from sustainably managed cooperatives of small private forest owners.
The pre-cut panels, supplemented by wood fiber insulation and non-treated siding, arrived at the site almost finished, reducing pollution to a minimum (the site being located in a dense suburb). The façades, in wood panels too, were mounted along the floor. With a very efficient exterior insulation system which completely allows the elimination of thermal bridges, wood construction has the advantage to make the building very powerful.
The under-floor gas-fired heating with low temperature becomes almost superfluous. The double-glazed + argon windows of the patios and the South façades, deliberately oversized, capture the sun in winter and are sheltered by a canopy and a pergola in summer. This allows together with their performance and surface, an easy control of the solar gain and air flow as needed, without necessitating an intensive use of air conditioning or heating.
The main facade on the street, lodging the rooms in the North, is a composition of large glazed openings and single opening shutters designed in stainless steel mirror with no glazing. The reflections of the vegetation and the movement of these shutters in stainless steel mirrors make the façade changing.
The ventilation of the rooms is regulated by the openings of the shutters, and the penetration of light through the windows. The recovery of rainwater can water the garden and planters allow homeowners to cultivate aromatic plants and garden without water over-consumption.
Architects: Djuric Tardio Architectes
Location: Paris, France
Completion: 2012
Surface: 246 sqm SHAB
Photographs: Clément Guillaume
Source: Archdaily
Post by Coco Pastis
