The House: Counter-Revolution on The Cote

THE HOUSE

Only a few decades ago, the French Riviera was a smiling land of tile-roofed fishing villages, creeks, coves, vineyards and cool pine forests flanking the Maritime Alps as they tumble into the green-blue Mediterranean. There were a few sedate hotels for sedate people. Then city people swarmed down from the sunless north, turning the beaches into a Cóte de Coney. With their headlong eagerness for a piece of the land to call their own, they turned the simple fishermen and winegrowers into gouging real-estate sharks, who chopped up the sea front and the slopes behind it into minute lots and sprawling housing developments, jerry-built apartment houses and vulgar villas in fake style provencal. Now, at last, the master planners have launched a counterrevolution.

The Cluster Life. The form this counterrevolution takes is the clustering of houses combined with the peripheral road—a combination that in the U.S. has filtered down from such large-scale architect-planners as Victor Gruen and William Pereira (TIME Cover, Sept. 6) to an enlightened band of commercial-housing developers.

The Riviera’s revolt is spearheaded by four architects under 40 who have been given the assignment of developing 165 acres of virgin land on Cap Camarat, six miles south of St. Tropez; the project is sponsored by Beaux Arts Architecture Professor Louis Arretche. Architects Jean Renaudie, Pierre Riboulet, Gérard Thurnauer and Jean Louis Véret have laid out the area in five “villages” of 35 to 50 houses each. Servicing them will be a general store, restaurant, clubhouse with tennis courts and a large swimming pool, plus a day nursery and a central facility for maid service.

Changing Attitudes. Most of the houses will have combined living and dining rooms, four bedrooms, two baths, and two terraces with views of the sea. Roofs will be covered with an insulating 18-inch layer of earth, planted as a garden. And the houses will be separated only by winding lanes and alleys too narrow for autos to get through. Automobiles will be left at the peripheral road, where residents will have their garages. Most of the land will thus be left free for forest paths, riding trails and open space for sports.

Prices for houses in the first cluster, called Village du Merlier, will be high: $60,000 to $90,000. But the cost of a Riviera sea view is astronomical anyhow. The big question is whether the French, with their passion for owning little postage stamps of property all to themselves, will accept the idea of cluster living. The real-estate agent at half-completed Village du Merlier feels that attitudes are already changing. “At first, only about one out of ten visitors was impressed,” he says. “Now at least half of them say they like the Village and the conception behind it.”