How to work French Riviera interiors chic into your home
A perfect dish for the French or Italian coast. Merfilus, marine-inspired rug, in botanical silk and wool. Bespoke and made to order, POA, rugsociety.eu.
Imagine a marble-floored hotel suite bathed in moonlight. Bond, James Bond, tosses the keys of his Aston Martin DB5 to a liveried valet. He prowls to a wide terrace fringed in the heads of palm trees stirred by the breezes stroking the shores of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
Fresh, sophisticated, dizzy with its ozone-drenched loveliness, Riviera style has been inspired for over a century by the interiors of the legendary upscale towns and villages of France and Italy fringing the sapphire depths of the Mediterranean.
This year, having always been popular as a fashion, it’s arrived in a new, upscale wave in interiors, and is trending worldwide. To understand, why this classic chapter in decorating has acted as the backdrop to the ocean antics of our rich and famous for decades, we have to water-ski back over two hundred years.
French interiors never recovered from the impact of the Neoclassical style (1760-1830) championed by the imperious, pocket-rocket Napoleon I. You can read more about my dashing Corsican crush and some of his influence on French style here.
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
Neoclassic might have looked very different to what we recognise as modern Riviera style of the 1920s forward, but restrained, uncluttered and supremely elegant, it was a major influence on the look-book. Rivera style despite the inclusion of mid-century modernity has the same airy touch and aristocratic refinement of Neoclassic palaces and salons, and there’s often quite a few 18th-century inclined antiques littered around the spaces.
Gentlefolk all over Europe, accrue furniture and expensive decorative goodies over generations (rich industrialists could have decorators indicate some well-bred surroundings). This is really what we’re faking with Riviera and other period-informed styles — inherited, layered-in furniture, art, collections and upper-class bits and bobs. The best-of-the-best.
French interior designers working on homes and hotel suites, the real working A-listers filling the pages of “World of Interiors” are brilliant at mixing up antique and newly minted design. It’s worth doing an image search, exploring how they whip together thick impasto oil abstract paintings from the 1970s, fat lacquered reproduction Boulle cabinets, Art Deco chrome and gilt encrusted pier mirrors.
The French Riviera has been a resort since Roman times. Ancient or modern, the look (Riviera is Italian for “coastline”) is a carefully curated French dish, infused with coastal light distilled through floor to ceilings windows and drifting cotton sheers. It’s light, soft and floaty.
We’re harking back to the era of legendary Cote D’Azure residents, roaming gamblers and tipsy, tanned, star personalities — Coco Chanel, Matisse, Somerset Maughan, Picasso, Brigitte Bardot, Elton John and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The glamorous, decadent playground of the intelligentsia and celebrity - the new royalty requiring a high-profile hideaway.
Still, like Hollywood Regency in the States, the confident glamour cruises on. Exquisite attention to detail, touches of mirror facing, ormolu, hover over polished parquet and waxed terracotta, with a patrician, effortless grace. Frankly, ma chere, it should look unapologetically high society and a bit expensive.
I know, I know, how do we conjure Villefranche-sur-Mer in Golleen, or relish our own St. Tropez down by The Lough? Yachting, open-topped sports cars, Hermes lashed over a sun-kissed décolletage, nestled in fat pearls — there’s not a trace of shabby in this chic mogul. If you’re into distressed, scrubbed back pine, and linen sofa throwsm move onto to French country or Swedish Gustavian, and leave this Gallic gentrified stuff alone.
Otherwise, the news is tres, tres bon. Riviera style has a very limited palette, and it’s easy to tickle up a room in indulgent, Champagne style on a modest, lemonade budget, once you get the basics right. If you have South-facing French doors, bay windows or any glazing letting the sunshine pour in, you’re off to a great start.
First of all: Walls. White is all you need. The room should read as clean and crisp as a Silvermint. Whatever the angle you take on Riviera, it all anchors on acres of largely uninterrupted white. The walls of this old seaside villa were plastered and white-washed. Choosing your white will depend on the aspect of the room and the amount of natural light you have to play with, but we’re looking for a something pure very and inflating, knocking shadows out of every corner.
In terms of furniture. We’re using really only a few, well-spaced, classy pieces, and most of these will stay on the floor rather than loading up the walls as you would with an era play like high Victorian or cottage-core. Spaciousness, bringing the breath of a white beach under a huge sky indoors, is really important. We want the furnishings we do include, to just about hover in a pale gilded light that’s flying everywhere. White matt walls, white windows treatments, white grounds to fabrics — white, white, white, not cream or rain greys — white.
Read More
To add vital colour or even some classical motifs in hand-painted or stencilled designs, go to blue first. Blue in shades from a fainting, delicate Wedgewood blue to a jewel-rich lapis, is your first accent colour, and it’s ideal with some earthy terracotta for accents and accessorising. We’re taking a lead from a hot, coastal, French seaside setting lapped by the Mediterranean. Gold, indicating blinding sunshine day-long, is lovely for a little belting for furniture and frames if you like period French spaces. For something a little more now for a room, pale wood can step in for a more modern take on Rivera’s fresh, up-scale atmosphere.
Edwardian brown furniture is a useful, inexpensive cheat for some antique/vintage inclusions that would be familiar in an accrued, coastal villa in Nice — dining sets and occasional chairs and leggy side-tables. Look for well-made Hepplewhite and Sheraton reproductions, hugely popular right into the 1940s with their book-matched veneers, inlays and slender, tapering legs. Cheap, unremarkable pieces can even take a sand and a little chalk paint, but make the finish flawless, no cheery, 1980s paint effects.
If you prefer mid-century front and centre, that kick leg, hair-pin supported furniture and button-backed velvet that’s all over the high street will work equally well. Just look for great lines, and pieces that look gorgeous from every direction. Place them with enough surrounding room to celebrate every decision you make. Chrome 70s and 80s lamps and pendants are reproduced in hundreds of varieties if you like a little rock-star style down-stage.
Hide, leather, linen and short pile wool — honest, natural materials are ideal for upholstery and rugs for these later 20th-century takes on the look.
For a coastal touch, opt for stripes over checks in tans or marine blue to channel classic, wind-buffeted deck chair sails. You can tweak the look to a seaside theme, but don’t go too Bohemian or rusticated.
Used in well-considered flashes, crystal is a perfect sophisticate for Riviera magic. Swaying, prismatic reflections using chandeliers of your favourite era, girandoles, and even one or two candelabra in glass or even laser-cut Perspex is worth a try. Don’t hang any cut glass lighting fixture too high. Clamping these pieces to the ceiling, can decimate the joie de vivre of a shrubby, glorious old dear from your local auction house. Invite it to the party, suspended low over a table. Add an immaculate white linen cloth, white dinnerware and frothing blooms, and you’re already on your way to the jewel shallows of the jet set.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
