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This is Villa Noailles, an early Modernist house, designed by architect Richard Mallet-Stevens, for art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. The house was built between 1923 and 1927.
The house's grounds include a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.
In the 1920s and 1930s Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles supported various artists, such as Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Luis Buñuel. They commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures by Balthus, Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuși, Miró, and Dora Maar. Villa Noailles features prominently in Man Ray's film Les Mystères du Château de Dé.
In 1940, the villa was occupied by the Italian Army and turned into a hospital. From 1947 until 1970, the villa was the summer residence of Marie-Laure. She died in 1970, and the house was purchased by the city of Hyères in 1973. Charles de Noailles died in 1981.
Marie-Laure de Noailles, Vicomtesse de Noailles, born Marie-Laure Henriette Anne Bischoffsheim, the only child of a French aristocrat mother and a Paris banker of German Jewish and American Quaker descent, lived in Paris in what was known as Hôtel Bischoffsheim or De Noailles, which now houses the Musée Baccarat, a private museum of Baccarat crystal. That mansion is featured on this website as Wombosi Mansion from the film The Bourne Identity.
The villa is now used as an arts center and for special exhibits.
James Lord was a guest there in the mid-fifties.
