Inside Coco Chanel’s Escape on the French Riviera

“In a world of struggle, of rain, of mud, of grey steel,” the French author and diplomat Paul Morand wrote of the Côte d’Azur in a 1929 article for this magazine, “it is the one region which strives to guard, in a softening air, the secret of doing nothing, and the sweetness of living nobly, that is to say, idly and slowly.”

The year prior, the writer, who had a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer dubbed L’Orangerie, gained a new Riviera neighbor in Gabrielle Chanel. The 45-year-old…