Peter Marino Restores Coco Chanel’s La Pausa Garden

At La Pausa, the garden was never intended to behave like an ornamental frame. It was part of the house’s character: aromatic, sun-struck and deliberately resistant to excessive polish. Lavender moved in the wind, olive branches cast shifting shadows across the stone and the Riviera’s intense light gave every restrained colour greater depth.

Following a meticulous restoration overseen by architect Peter Marino, Gabrielle Chanel’s retreat at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin has reopened as a private residence and place for cultural creation. The project returns one of the most personal expressions of her aesthetic to the house that bears her name, recovering not merely its rooms and furnishings but its dialogue with the Mediterranean landscape.

The result is best understood through couture. The garden combines structure with movement, repetition with irregularity and a disciplined palette with richly tactile surfaces. Its lavender, iris, stone, earth and silvery foliage form a living textile around the villa — composed, but never stiff.

A House Tailored to Its Landscape

Built in 1928 in the hills above the Mediterranean, La Pausa was the only home entirely imagined by Gabrielle Chanel. She worked with the young architect Robert Streitz to create what she considered an ideal Mediterranean villa: restrained in form, generous in proportion and intimately connected to its setting.

The house drew upon memories of Aubazine Abbey, where Chanel spent part of her childhood. Its high white spaces, cloister-like arches and monumental stone staircase possess an almost monastic severity. Yet the surrounding landscape softens that discipline. The architecture establishes the line; the garden introduces movement.

That relationship resembles the construction of a Chanel jacket. Beneath the ease is an exacting framework. At La Pausa, gridded windows, paved squares, arcades and repeated openings provide the underlying geometry, while vegetation loosens its edges. Creepers cross masonry, foliage interrupts sightlines and old trees refuse to conform to an imposed plan.

One olive tree near the entrance was considered so integral to the property that the approach was built around it. Visitors had to alter their path rather than expect the landscape to yield. It was a small decision with a distinctly Chanel quality: practical, independent and quietly radical.

Lavender as a Signature

If wheat became one of the recurring emblems of Chanel’s Parisian world, lavender belongs to La Pausa. Historic photographs show the designer immersed in its high, loosely arranged stems, appearing less like the owner of a formal estate than a figure absorbed into the terrain.

Chanel valued lavender at a time when such Mediterranean planting could be dismissed as rustic or commonplace. Its appeal was not founded on rarity. It lay in its colour, scent and natural affinity with the dry Riviera landscape. Doors were left open so that the wind could carry its fragrance through the house.

The garden was not to appear manicured into submission. Maintenance was intentionally gentle, preserving an impression of abundance rather than producing the clipped perfection of a conventional show garden. That instinct mirrors Chanel’s transformation of humble jersey into modern luxury: value emerged through proportion, intelligence and context rather than ostentation.

Lavender also supplies the estate’s most persuasive colour note. Against white plaster, beige stone, black ironwork and the green-grey leaves of the olives, its dusty purple feels both natural and exquisitely controlled. It is colour used as Chanel often used jewellery — not to overwhelm the composition, but to sharpen it.

Iris, Olive and the Riviera Palette

Contemporary descriptions of La Pausa’s historic gardens recorded orange trees, broad expanses of lavender, purple iris and climbing roses. Together they created a sensorial landscape in which perfume, colour and texture were inseparable.

The iris is particularly resonant. Its cool, powdery character would later become central to the house’s La Pausa fragrance, translating the memory of the villa into an olfactory composition. In the garden, its purple tones deepen the lavender palette; in fragrance, iris becomes an intimate trace of place.

The olive trees provide a different register. Their twisted trunks and muted foliage bring age, shadow and permanence to the estate. Marino’s restoration respects their irregular authority rather than treating them as decorative accessories. They are the landscape’s equivalent of patina: evidence that beauty can accumulate through time rather than depend upon newness.

Seen together, the garden’s colours recall a nuanced tweed. Lavender, iris, bark, pale stone and silver-green leaves create a weave of close but distinct tones. The comparison is not literal; it is a way of reading the landscape. As in couture, complexity appears through the interaction of individual threads.

Peter Marino’s Discipline of Restoration

Marino approached La Pausa with the rigour of an architectural historian. Hundreds of archival photographs were studied alongside plans, correspondence, receipts and other surviving records. Original furnishings were traced at auction, while lost elements were reconstructed with close attention to their former scale, material and position.

The restoration was not conceived as a contemporary reinterpretation. Its ambition was to recover the atmosphere of the house during Chanel’s lifetime, as though its owner had only recently stepped away. Modern plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems were introduced discreetly, with the property also converted to renewable electricity.

That philosophy extends naturally into the landscape. Restoration here does not mean making the garden look new. It means allowing the villa and its grounds to regain the relationship recorded in the archives: cultivated without becoming precious, carefully maintained without losing spontaneity.

Even two candelabra cacti associated with the staircase were treated with unusual patience. Marino personally nurtured replacements until they approached the height of those visible in period photographs. The gesture captures the project’s wider philosophy. Authenticity was pursued not through spectacle, but through cumulative acts of precision.

A Living House Rather Than a Museum

La Pausa was never simply an escape from Paris. It was a setting for conversation, performance and creative freedom. Chanel welcomed artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers, among them Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy and Luchino Visconti. Dalí spent four productive months at the villa in 1938.

The rooms were not crowded with art because the artists themselves supplied the life of the house. Guests gathered around the piano, danced after dinner, played tennis and talked beneath the olives. The garden was therefore social as well as visual — a sequence of paths, terraces, shaded places and fragrant thresholds through which the life of La Pausa unfolded.

That spirit now shapes the villa’s future. La Pausa forms part of Chanel Heritage Sites and will serve as a private setting for cultural creation, inspiration and education. It is open by invitation rather than as a conventional public attraction.

This controlled reopening protects the intimacy that gave the property its meaning. La Pausa has been restored not as a frozen monument to an untouchable past, but as a house capable of receiving ideas again.

In Marino’s hands, the renewed landscape does not compete with Chanel’s legacy. It reveals how completely that legacy already existed in stone, planting, scent and proportion. The garden’s apparent freedom is held by an invisible discipline, just as the softness of couture depends upon the accuracy of its cut.

La Pausa is consequently more than a recovered Riviera villa. It is one of the clearest surviving expressions of Chanel’s way of seeing: luxury without display, nature without sentimentality and structure without constraint. Among the lavender and olives, her design language is no longer merely remembered. It is alive.

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