From 23 June to 25 September 2025, Ralph Pucci International, the New York art and design gallery, will present ‘Pure’, an exhibition at Château La Coste in France. This marks the fourth contemporary design showcase at the destination, which is set within a 600-acre sculpture park nestled among the vineyards of Provence.

Housed in Oscar Niemeyer’s Pavilion – the Brazilian architect’s final project before his death in 2012 – ‘Pure’ marks the 70th anniversary of Ralph Pucci International and 50 years since Ralph Pucci assumed leadership of the gallery.

The exhibition highlights the artistry of workshop processes. Central to the show are sculptural works crafted from Ralph Pucci International’s proprietary Plasterglass material, developed at the brand’s New York studio and factory. This unique medium resembles plaster and retains the artist's original marks.

Featured pieces include tables, lighting and seating by esteemed designers such as Patrick Naggar, Eric Schmitt, John Koga, Paul Mathieu and Elizabeth Garouste. Rendered in pure white, these works emphasise clean lines and varied textures, and eschew any form of ornamentation. Their minimalism draws attention to their materiality, form and scale; this is design in its ‘purest’ expression. All exhibited pieces will be available for purchase.

The inspiration for the exhibition, Pucci explains, emerged from an encounter with Château La Coste’s owner, Paddy McKillen, during a shared taxi ride from the airport. Discovering a mutual appreciation for each other's work, they agreed to collaborate. ‘Château La Coste is internationally renowned as a leading arts destination,’ Pucci notes. ‘It’s thrilling that Paddy has chosen to spotlight us and contemporary design within such an inspiring setting.’

Audiences will also experience live sculpting sessions by Ralph Pucci International’s master sculptor, offering insight into the processes of the New York studio, which has its origins in the mannequin industry and evolved into a luxury furniture producer and collectible design gallery.

All of this will unfold to a soundtrack of 1950s jazz – Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Art Blakey, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Chet Baker – transporting visitors back to the era when the brand was founded.

This exhibition is a holistic celebration of Ralph Pucci International’s artistic and design legacy. ‘I have always celebrated art in all its forms – whether music, painting, photography, dance, sculpture, or architecture,’ the founder reflects. ‘This show is an exciting opportunity to bring all those passions together.’

Details of the exhibition can be found at ralphpucci.com

Florian Monfrini wordlessly takes white stones from a pile, places them into two wicker buckets attached to a wooden dowel, then hauls them up a gravel path to another spot, where he'll use them to build a ‘petite architecture’. A few days from now, he will move them again.

Visitors to Château La Coste in the south of France, might come to see monumental outdoor works by Damien Hirst and Louise Bourgeois, to eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant, to taste wines in a Jean Nouvel-designed cellar. An itinerant work by a local artist carrying stones on his back is not typically part of the programme. But now, two worlds collide, as artists from the Poush art centre in the northern suburbs of Paris temporarily occupy the Provençal wine estate and its 500 acres of pathways, grapevines, oak and olive trees, and architectural jewels.

Poush was created in 2020 as a place to support contemporary creation. It currently comprises 270 artists from around the world, who pay a minimal rate to rent individual ateliers in a 22,000 sq m former perfume factory. The support also involves organising exhibitions in diverse places.

The current show at Château La Coste is called ‘Par Quatre Chemins’ – a nod to the name of Poush's closest metro stop in Aubervilliers, Paris, but also a French expression that means wandering rather than getting straight to the point. Poush's director, Yvannoé Kruger, says, ‘The artists were able to come and spend some time here [at Château La Coste], to get to know the locals, the quarries, the gardeners, to take the pulse of this landscape, to feel their way around and find the best way to insert themselves.’

The show features 35 artists (most from Poush, though some, like Monfrini, were invited for the event), representing 14 nationalities. One hundred and sixty of their works are scattered around the property and inside the various pavilions. They play off the site's nature, geography, architecture, regional customs and history. Co-commisaire Margaux Knight says, ‘The work is very diverse, a counterweight to the big solo shows we're used to seeing here.’

Most were created or revisited for this exhibition, around a dozen of them in situ. For example, Henri Frachon's Sea of holes consists of circular cavities dug out of the ground, each one containing a natural element from the domain (for example, a portion of a tree trunk), anchored in the soil to resist any wild boar that might wander by.

At the entrance, in the shade of architect Tadao Ando's façade, stands Pauline Guerrier’s The Guardians, three totems she first made in Bénin, covered in cotton fabric dyed with local pigments, inspired by the Zangbeto traditional guardians of the night. ‘Here,’ says Guerrier, ‘they become the guardians of this domain and the exhibition,’ keeping any evil spirits away.

Next to a Truism Bench by Jenny Holzer (a permanent installation), Sabine Mirlesse has hung a bell within a small grove of trees, its long clapper resting on a water-filled indent in the ground. Mirlesse originally created this piece elsewhere in the south of France, where she learned that residents resented ‘helicopter artists’ who come down from Paris to create works with no link to local culture. So she asked village elders about their stories, and was taken to a spring where a church bell was hidden, a practice used to protect them from being melted into munitions.

Château La Coste also features buildings by world-renowned architects. One is Oscar Niemeyer's curved auditorium (his final design to be realised), where several Poush artists are showing works. A fellow Brazilian, Marlon de Azambuja, took a book of photographs of gas tanks by the German duo Berne and Hilla Becher and carefully covered the images with reflective black marker. ‘At the beginning of modernism in Brazil, you have this idea of “eating” European influence and transforming it into your identity,’ the artist explains. ‘For me, it's important that a Brazilian hand reconstructed this patrimony, this very precise German photography.’

La Mediterannée, a trio that describes itself as an ‘exhibition-oriented research group’, has taken over Richard Rogers' spectacular cantilevered gallery (also this architect's last building) with a collection of works that respond to the idea of empty space. At one end, an imposing oak sculpture by Edgar Sarin soaks in a prime view of the landscape from what Sarin calls Rogers' ‘corridor on the void’.

A former wine cellar redesigned by Jean-Michel Wilmotte is lit dimly, like a grotto, by a video covering one entire wall. The video is Justine Emard’s Hyperphantasia, confronting ancient and state-of-the-art approaches to image-making. An AI tool constantly produces new ‘drawings’ from a database of paleolithic cave paintings from Chauvet Pont-d'Arc as well as encephalographic signals (EEGs) from astronauts dreaming in orbit.

Two large oil paintings hang on either side of the video. The hyperrealist canvases, by Dhewadi Hadjab, were first shown in the Saint-Eustache church in Paris. In each, a contemporary dancer's sweatpant-clad body is slung over a prie-dieu, or prayer chair, in a pose that recalls the Descent from the Cross, or classic paintings of religious ecstasy. ‘At Saint-Eustache, these hung near a painting by Rubens,’ notes Hadjab. ‘Here they are in a different kind of chapel, in dialogue with a video, which gives them another dimension.’

And in a sunken pavilion designed by Renzo Piano, one wall displays artist Sara Favriau’s Les Petits Riens, or ‘Little Nothings’, delicate objects found on the property that are usually overlooked – a bird’s feather, a bottle cap – but here exhibited like tiny relics. Outside on the terrace, Angela Jiménez Durán has done the opposite, unearthing huge tree stumps on the property, cleaning the earth from the roots, and enveloping them in wax. ‘I wanted to create a portrait of the landscape underground, and these roots we don't see,’ says Durán. ‘By transforming, or “frosting” them with paraffin, I'm giving shape to objects that are no longer alive, that we don't consider important, but which still have an existence and a presence.’ As she reminds us, not all the sculptures on this land are man-made.

‘Par Quatre Chemins’ runs until 9 June 2025 at Château La Coste, France, chateau-la-coste.com

The rolling landscape of Green Provence heralds Château La Coste, a hybrid destination for art, wine, nature and joie de vivre that has been organically evolving since it opened in 2002. Across the 17th-century wine estate’s 200 hectares, Irish hospitality extraordinaire and art collector Paddy McKillen has gradually accumulated outdoor sculptures (45 and counting) by artists and friends such as Ai Weiwei and Bob Dylan, multiple experimental architectural pavilions by the likes of Richard Rogers and Oscar Niemeyer, and five restaurant concepts along with their maverick chefs.

Auberge La Coste, Aix-en-Provence

Encouraged by the nearly 400,000 annual visitors in 2023, McKillen’s latest evolution is a second hotel, Auberge La Coste. Inspired by the welcoming ethos of an ‘inn’ for travelling culture lovers, it’s a more accessible and convivial offering than the 28-room luxury Villa La Coste (opened in 2016 and tucked away on a secluded hillside plot). Adjacent to the daily energy of the restaurants, wine cave and galleries of the Château La Coste village, the 76 rooms of the Auberge line a Provençal-style cobbled street of raw stone and cream-coloured plaster walls, along which shops and studios will gradually open.

In a seamless continuation of the refined hospitality yet laid-back character of the estate, the contemporary architecture and interiors (designed by the in-house team) are fresh and minimal, yet layered with character and rooted in context. Postcard-perfect yellow umbrellas shade colourful tables and chairs flanked by cypress trees, pink peonies and a fountain. Rooms are understated yet luxurious in materiality, from the soft bed linen to the light-wood flooring, and atmosphere, with their abundant sense of space and light; curtains open to dappled sunlight over vineyard or sculpture park views.

Just like the whole of the estate, McKillen’s personality and outlook are present at the Auberge, where a painterly mural pictures his beloved Irish Wolfhounds and a wood-panelled Irish bar of red leather banquettes is decorated with local market finds. The family-oriented culinary offerings bring a decidedly international approach to this extension of the village; a generous lunch menu lists hearty sharing plates and popular classics from a cheeseburger to fish and chips, while a new rotisserie restaurant will open in late summer with a terrace immersed in vineyard views (it’s here where a picturesque breakfast is served for guests).

Like each new evolution, it’s clear that Auberge will soon start to shape future programming and possibilities. Since its soft launch in March, it has welcomed creative couples keen to absorb the art trail and wine-tasting experience beyond a day trip, as well as those seeking a chic base from which to explore Provence and the Luberon Valley; there are also adjoining rooms for families and studios with kitchenettes for longer stays, ideal for hosting the estate’s creative visitors during events from weddings to vernissages.

While there isn’t a pool, experiencing sunset and sunrise on the trail after hours is the draw; a quiet early morning walk – climbing up the softened timber staircases that tread through the consciously managed wilderness to revisit a sculpture or meditate on a carved stone bench – is recommended. As is the effortless lavender-scented evening stroll back from dinner at the Italian restaurant Vanini after a couple of glasses of biodynamically cultivated Château La Coste rosé. From waking up to an exuberant Damien Hirst sculpture to winding down with a Guinness, this Provençal Auberge is certainly unlike any other.

Auberge La Coste is located at 2750 Rte de la Cride, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, aubergelacoste.com

It is clear when pulling into the glorious, 500-acre winery and cultural destination Château La Coste that there is something different afoot. While art aficionados will know Louise Bourgeois’ spider is crouching in the water, ready to spring, as Yoko Ono’s wishes sway on the branches of a tree and Prune Nourry’s pregnant woman reclines into the ground, they may not expect to be greeted by Damien Hirst’s vast anatomical sculpture of a man. Elsewhere, the resigned face of Charity confronts the visitor as they begin their tour around the estate, while a centaur from Treasures points the way.

Damien Hirst’s Château La Coste takeover

These outdoor sculptures dotted around the grounds are only the beginning of Hirst’s immersive, full takeover of Château La Coste. The first artist to completely take over both the grounds and the five exhibition pavilions, Hirst is using the opportunity to showcase more than 90 sculptures and paintings, including work previously unseen, as part of major exhibition, ‘The Light That Shines’, presented by HENI.

A long friendship between Hirst and Château La Coste founder, Paddy McKillen, means this project has been on the cards for years, the obvious culmination of McKillen’s long-standing philosophy to only work with architects and artists he personally admires. 

Seeing Hirst’s work in the context of its Provençal backdrop feels oddly natural. His career-long preoccupations with the tensions between art and science, and life and death, take on a sharp focus when viewed against the natural surrounding beauty, the sculptures at the mercy of the seasons. His work is carefully placed, with great consideration given to the character of each pavilion. Particularly special is viewing the never-before-seen The Empress Paintings in the remarkable Richard Rogers Gallery. Vivid orange, the gallery floats over the trees, a masterpiece of engineering that seemingly requires no support. It’s a magical foil for Hirst’s red and black butterflies, also hovering above us, cast into hypnotic kaleidoscopes in a surreal immersion. 

Underground, the sharks float, swimming through the underwater light of the Renzo Piano Pavilion. It’s a serene, light-filled space for key pieces from the Natural History series, which fluctuate as the light does, peculiarly ethereal. The Bastide Gallery holds the brightly coloured The Secret Gardens Paintings, while new work, Cosmos Paintings, alongside sculptures from the Meteorites and Satellites series, are given the clean white canvas of Jean-Michel Wilmotte’s Old Wine Storehouse, boosted by the intimacy of its proportions. Hirst, who was inspired by the long-exposure images from Hubble Space Telescope for the new Cosmos Paintings series, began by painting the canvases black and fixing them to the floor, to then go over them with paint, which makes for a rough and textured viscerality. 

In the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium sits a generous amount of pieces from 2017’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’, first shown at Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in Venice. The winding proportions of the pavilion respect the narrative of the work, a thread that runs throughout.

‘Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines’ , presented by HENI, is on from 2 March – 23 June 2024 at Château la Coste

chateau-la-coste.com

‘If she is happy, I am happy,’ says Vietnamese artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen referring to Mother Earth and her creation of an intricate stainless-steel sculpture that encases a dead oak tree in the grounds of sculpture park and organic winery Château La Coste in Aix-en-Provence, which Irish hotelier and property magnate, Paddy McKillen began mapping out on purchasing the land back in 2002.

The Flower of Life work, a remarkable piece of ‘tree art’, comprising thousands of soldered stainless steel 5mm strips resembling bark, shimmering steel oak leaves and gemstone and crystal fruits and flowers, was assembled on site over two months. It is the first time Nguyen has worked with the material (one ton of it) and numerous practice branches were made with local artisans and welders in her studio in Ho Chi Minh City to explore the technique and construction methods.

The multidisciplinary artist, who also works in painting, with canvases embroidered with tiny beads, in fashion (her label is called Thuy Design House), and in film, sees no obstacles in new mediums. ‘The material, whether fabric, paint or film, does not matter – the medium is a way of showing an idea and giving my energy through a form,’ says the vivacious Nguyen, who is a follower of Buddhism. On-site, the installation required further engineering, with an invisible structure inserted inside to support and eventually supersede the dying tree. The oak was earmarked for the tree surgeon’s chop before Nguyen set her vision on giving it a second life. ‘The metal will patina and change with time and wind, rain and sun. That is Mother Earth. I make the sculpture but Mother Earth finishes it,’ she smiles.

Flower of Life, which reflects the luminous Provence light in myriad ways, is installed in the middle of a roadway by a terrace of new inn-style rooms (opening 2024), that leads up past the Tadao Ando pavilion and through cypress trees to the luxury hotel Villa La Coste. The 600-acre sculpture park is home to a bounty of site-specific works by a roll call of greats including Conrad Shawcross, Sean Scully, Tracey Emin, Ai WeiWei and Richard Serra and Andy Goldsworthy. All the artworks dialogue with the bucolic landscape that shifts from vineyards to plateaus, woodland and man-made lakes (one with Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider, 2003 scuttling across). The collection and curatorial programme (overseen by Daniel Kennedy) is ever expanding across art, music and design with shows staged in the Oscar Neimeyer-, Renzo Piano- and Richard Rogers-designed pavilions and spaces.

Nguyen first visited the estate nine years ago and fell in love with the gnarled, twisted branches of the oak and took a portrait of herself by the tree. ‘Back then there was no hotel here but Paddy invited me to discover the space and think about creating a work. It was huge for me to do something in France but he encouraged me,’ she explains.

Their friendship dates back to her student years. A patron and collector of established as well as emerging artists, McKillen, who was working on property developments in Vietnam, first discovered Nguyen while she was studying at the University of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Min City and showing work in small café galleries. They remained in touch through subsequent studies for her scholarship-funded PhD at the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kyiv, where she graduated in 2014. Her first work for the growing sculpture park at Chateau La Coste was Silver Room (2017) which is tucked up in the hills. It was inspired by a traditional Vietnamese Rong House, a wood and bamboo structure made for gatherings and prayer. The Silver Room contains a crystal Buddha on a carved tree trunk and is illuminated by light that filters through slits in the walls. An exhibition of embroidered cloud paintings, Floating into Nothingness, followed in 2022, and the richly coloured scapes hang throughout the hotel space.

Flower of Life is accompanied by an exhibition curated by the château’s curator Daniel Kennedy, at the Oscar Neimeyer-designed pavilion (his swansong work before his death in 2010), featuring stainless steel thread woven 3D panels, and square format cloud works with densely embroidered branches.

The château attracts over 100,000 visitors a year, who come to discover the artworks and dine at the restaurants (including an Argentinian by Francis Mallman), offering an enlightened kind of hospitality built on culture, nature and, of course, the organic vineyard. While McKillen might be locked in litigation over the value of Maybourne, which owns luxury London hotels Claridge’s, The Connaught and The Berkeley, Château La Coste is working proof of his visionary smarts. He was also appointed honorary counsul of Vietnam in Dublin in 2023.

For Nguyen, McKillen’s spotlight has attracted new collectors and commissions including a show at Almine Rech in Paris (January 2024) as well as shining a light on an emerging generation of Vietnamese artists. She set up the workspace and gallery, Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh. ‘I want to give an example and help mentor the next generation. If I can do it – you can do it and some day we will do it together,’ she says.

Flower of Life is at Château La Coste in Aix-en-Provence

chateau-la-coste.com

A new Richard Rogers exhibition, celebrating the ideas and oeuvre of the late, great architect has just launched at Chateau La Coste in France. The show was not only fittingly created by Ab Rogers, a designer and founder of the London studio Ab Rogers Design as well as the architect’s son; it is also staged at Rogers’ last project, the gravity-defying Drawing Gallery within the French destination’s expansive, leafy estate. 

Richard Rogers exhibition: the architect's work and ideas

The exhibition focuses on ‘Rogers’ buildings as manifestations of his ideas’. It spans ten projects, all pivotal in his career, but not all built – from Zip-Up House (1967-69) and Centre Pompidou (1977) to Industrialized Housing (1992), The Millennium Dome (1999) Tree House (2016), and of course the vessel of the show itself, the Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery (2020). 

A bold approach when it comes to the exhibition design underlines the architect's strong ideas, drawing parallels to his ‘electric personality’. The walls in the single-space gallery pavilion have been painted bright pink. The architect’s own voice is ever present, echoing in the space, as the show includes the film ‘Exposed’, which was commissioned for the Pompidou exhibition that celebrated the building’s 40th anniversary in 2007. 

Ab Rogers says: ‘This is a portrait of a man who never stopped being curious and never wanted to stop learning. His buildings were the physical manifestation of his beliefs, driven by social, environmental, ethical, and political passions.’

'Richard Rogers at the Drawing Gallery' runs 22 October 2023 - 7 January 2024 at Chateau La Coste

rshp.com 

chateau-la-coste.com

abrogers.com 

Nestled in the bucolic, vineyard-dappled wonderland surrounding Château La Coste sits what is claimed to be Oscar Niemeyer’s final building. This is contested, but regardless, the two-part pavilion that opened earlier this year is a quintessentially Niemeyer structure: sinuous curves, crisp white concrete walls reflected in a shallow adjacent pool, and a near 360-degree glass facade, adjoining a cylindrical auditorium. 

Such a significant building calls for a significant inaugural exhibition, a task to which British artist Annie Morris has risen. Co-curated by Georgina Cohen, her exhibition is a congregation of the artist’s Stacks, totemic towers of vibrantly pigmented spheres of varying sizes. There’s a rhythm to these works, alternating between precarity and stability, and despite their vibrancy, they carry a more poignant symbolic weight. As the artist told us in a 2021 interview, Stacks were initially created in grief following the tragic stillbirth of her first child in 2014, but have since evolved into a ‘joyous obsession’. 

At the heart of this obsession is raw pigment, which Morris hand-sources and applies to the surface of her plaster and sand spheres. ‘I have always been drawn to raw pigment. I wanted to try and capture pigment as it is, and before it dries,’ Morris told us last year. ‘It has a certain lightness and richness that feels very alive and fragile.’ Raw pigments create a velvet-like surface that swallows light. There’s Morris’ frequented palette: ultramarine, viridian and ochre – and more recently, the addition of lavender and pale greens inspired by recent visits to Provençal vineyards.

Morris’ smaller, newer sculptures – often comprising a three-sphere stack – carry more figurative qualities, suggesting the female form or pregnant body. The pigment experimentation continues in a group of paintings, which are assembled to form a vast, 15m-wide mural. These are accompanied by tapestries and drawings, which, like Morris’ sculptures, occupy a space between figuration and abstraction. 

Outdoors, in the latest addition to Château La Coste’s vast art and architecture trail, Morris has installed a monumental 6m-bronze Stack sculpture, which sits face-to-face with Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider, creating a cross-generational dialogue on themes of femininity, motherhood and birth. 

As Morris says of her new show, ‘My sculptures are about holding onto something that's fallen, and to express the hope and defiance of life. The vibrant pigment on the surface is a way of trying to freeze the moment when paint hasn’t yet dried, and is caught in its most raw form. They assemble to create abstract paintings that escalate upwards and express the fragility we all feel in our lives.’

INFORMATION
Annie Morris’ exhibition runs until September 2022 at Château La Coste. chateau-la-coste.com

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2750 Route de La Cride
13610 Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

The latest addition to Château La Coste’s ever increasing collection of architectural pavilions and art installations is billed as the final project drawn by Oscar Niemeyer. As recently as 2020, the owner of a Leipzig tram factory proudly claimed that a 40ft concrete and glass sphere, pinned to the top corner of one of his buildings and housing a restaurant and bar, represented Niemeyer’s last design (see W*241). As it turns out, Paddy McKillen, the founder of Château La Coste, has simply taken longer to finish his rather more substantial project. And even now, ten years after Niemeyer’s death, just a few days short of his 105th birthday, there are still schemes being worked on that carry his name.

Set in the rolling landscape of Provence and home to works by the likes of Frank Gehry, Tracey Emin, Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer and Ai Weiwei, Château La Coste now has an 80-seat auditorium that sits inside a circular white concrete drum, attached like a hinge to a teardrop-shaped, 4,000 sq ft glass-walled gallery. It sits in a dip in the vineyards that surround the hotel at Château La Coste, and is reached by a path that curls languidly through the vines, entering the pavilion across a shallow reflecting pool. These are motifs familiar from Niemeyer’s earlier buildings. He used water everywhere, from Brasilia to his office building for Mondadori on the edge of Milan. The confrontation of a drum-shaped solid element, with transparent free form glass, is a paraphrase of the cultural centre in Le Havre that he finished in 1983.

Niemeyer’s astonishingly long architectural career began in the 1930s when he was a young assistant in a team supervised by Le Corbusier designing Brazil’s ministry of education in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1940s, he met Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte, the city in which he designed his first independent buildings. After the war, Niemeyer sparred with Le Corbusier to shape the multi-authored United Nations building in New York. When Kubitschek became Brazil’s president, he appointed Niemeyer as the architect of his new capital city, Brasilia.

As a communist, Niemeyer left the country in 1964, when the army took over the government. While in exile, he built the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris, a venue later selected by Miuccia Prada in which to show a collection. He is certainly the only architect to have been awarded both the Pritzker Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize.

After 2006, Niemeyer became increasingly frail, though that did not stop him from marrying his 60-year-old assistant Vera Lucia Cabreira at the age of 98. In 2011, McKillen visited his studio in Rio, above the beach at Copacabana, to talk about Niemeyer’s project for him. ‘Oscar beckoned me towards a picture in his office of swimmers on Ipanema Beach, suggesting the building would be inspired by the female form,’ McKillen recalls. ‘I remember clearly his many questions on the vineyards at Château La Coste, and how he expressed his love for a good glass of red wine.’

By that time, the architect’s sight was deteriorating. He relied on his sense of touch to feel architectural models, and lightboxes to read the drawings made for him by his staff. He could no longer manage to do his party piece for the flow of visitors who came to see him. Until he was well over 90, he would ask them to name any of his many buildings, produce a pen and, without pausing to think, capture its essence with a single fluent black line on a sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to an easel. His assistant would unpin it, fold it up and present it as a gift.

Niemeyer had long since stopped travelling. He never saw the Serpentine Pavilion, unveiled in his absence in 2003. Nor did he go to the opening of his last sizeable project finished while he was still alive, the ill-fated Niemeyer Cultural Centre in Spain, which closed nine months after it opened in 2011, before reopening the next year under new management.

Jair Valera, an assistant who had worked for Niemeyer since 1974, went to see Château La Coste on his behalf in 2010. He walked the site, chose a location and went back to Brazil. In conversation with Niemeyer, he came up with four or five proposals. McKillen selected the one that has finally been realised. It sits on land protected by the local authority as agricultural, and so it took a protracted period of persuasion to secure the necessary permissions before McKillen’s team built the structure standing here today.

The Château La Coste project is unlikely to be the end of it. In Brazil, the appetite for posthumous Niemeyer projects, large and small, is seemingly insatiable. The year after Niemeyer’s death, his office, which by then was being run by Valera, alongside Niemeyer’s granddaughter, the late Ana Elisa Niemeyer (also an architect), picked up several large new projects, including a research park in northern Brazil and an aquarium planned for a coastal suburb of Rio. Back in France, with the final touches applied as we write, Niemeyer's pavilion at Château La Coste opens to the public this month.

INFORMATION

chateau-la-coste.com

Some say good things come in pairs. In the case of American artist Roni Horn’s latest show at Château La Coste, this is half true, and twice as complex. 

‘A Rat Surrendered Here’ is a show about death, and doubles. The title is taken from Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name in which a rat surrenders to the irresistibility of ignominious acts, only to be caught in an inevitable trap of punishment; ‘reluctantly resigned’ to temptation – a warning to all those afflicted with the human condition.

Back at Château La Coste, there are few actual rats to be found, but there are photographs of two deceased owls that prompt a double-take. A recurring theme throughout the show, Horn’s formal device of the paired image is related to the psychoanalytic concepts of ego-splitting and the uncanny.

Psychoanalytically speaking, the figure of the double – the doppelgänger in literature and film – is the ominous harbinger of death.  

In a body of work spanning sculpture, photography, and drawing, death appears as both as literal fact, and as a philosophical inquiry into the darker caverns of the human mind. The experiential qualities of light, shadow, and reflection in Horn’s work link to the mutability of identity and, with it, the inscrutability of death. 

In the photographic series, Still Water, 1999, water becomes a mirror. Horn’s subject, the River Thames, reflects the often-overcast skies above London. Yet in this work, it’s not just about what the river reflects, but what it has absorbed. Deeper still, Horn explores the darkness of the river’s history, one riddled with stories of suicide and crime. 

Continuing Horn’s unique formula of minimalism-meets-language, the exhibition will premiere the ten-tonne glass installation, Water Double, v. 4, the latest in the acclaimed series she has worked on since the 1990s. It comprises two sculptures made from solid cast glass, each with an oculus that resembles a watery surface.

These pieces – that look as though they might swallow the gallery and viewer – are poetic studies of identity, fluidity and perception, themes that Horn’s work continually confronts to compelling effect.

INFORMATION

Roni Horn, ‘A Rat Surrendered Here’, until 24 October 2021, chateau-la-coste.com

Last September, when Richard Rogers stepped down from the architectural practice that he founded more than 40 years ago, he still had one personal project underway. Now, the last building of Rogers’ long and distinguished career, the new Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste in Provence, is complete. It’s tiny, but spectacular. Vivid orange and hovering, apparently weightless, the building cantilevers out of a thickly wooded ridge too steep for planting the vines that grow in neat rows on either side.

The gallery is the latest addition to developer and hotelier Paddy McKillen’s remarkable collection of art and architecture across the Château La Coste estate – a winery and cultural destination that includes his smallest hotel, Villa La Coste (W*214). McKillen also leads The Connaught and Claridge’s, and other luxury hotels in Monaco, Los Angeles and Kyoto.

Rogers joins a roster of stellar architects who have contributed buildings to the Château La Coste project. In 2008, McKillen tasked Tadao Ando with creating a pavilion, and a reflecting pool for Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider and Alexander Calder’s Small Crinkly. He followed this up with a chai de vinification (wine storehouse) from Jean Nouvel and a gallery designed by Renzo Piano, while he also shipped in Frank Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine pavilion from London.

McKillen had wanted to add a building from Rogers, a long-time friend, ever since he acquired Château La Coste. It took time for the right idea to emerge from a series of conversations, most of them involving lunch. During a weekend at the estate in 2011, McKillen, Richard and his wife Ruthie Rogers took a bike ride along the chalky track of an old Roman road that skirts the vineyards. ‘I gave Richard two things, the idea of a gallery to show drawings, and the view,’ McKillen remembers. That was when Rogers hit on the idea of creating the gallery as a single dramatic gesture, a giant cantilever that leaps off the ridge seemingly into mid-air with no visible means of support. It was the chance to realise a long-held ambition, to pay homage to the cantilevered terraces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater that Rogers had first seen as a student at Yale in 1962.

McKillen recalls two crucial moments in the evolution of the design. The first was at Courchevel, where he and Rogers went skiing the following spring. ‘Richard took me to see a house projecting off a hillside held up by a single column. I remember him saying, “If we can’t get the gallery to work, we can always put in a column”. But it was that column that gave it all away. And that’s when I said, “It’s either 100 per cent pure, or it’s not, and if it’s not pure, better not do it at all”.’

Stephen Spence’s sketch for the pavilion. Richard Rogers’ best known early work is arguably the Centre Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1977 with Renzo Piano. In the same year, the architect founded the Richard Rogers Partnership in London, which evolved into Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) in 2007. Now the practice has 11 partners and has just launched a new office in Paris – marking Rogers’ retirement by returning, in a way, to where it all began. ‘We currently have a range of exciting new projects in progress there, in a range of typologies at a wide range of scales,’ says RSHP partner responsible for France, Stephen Barrett. ‘Prompted by Brexit and the regrettable drawing up of once permeable boundaries that it implies, we are finally taking the plunge in setting up a Paris office, all these years after the project office that Richard and Renzo established in the early 1970s. Of course, we’ve never really been away, and London and Paris are so very close, but this step is also an affirmation, an important symbol of confidence and commitment to a country and to clients we value deeply.’ 

Wright used reinforced concrete to launch a pair of terraces into space. Rogers’ cantilever is tailor-made from steel tubes. According to his engineer Bob Lang, ‘it works like a see-saw’. A pivot positioned on the edge of the ridge takes the load. The shorter, landside arm is anchored to foundations sunk into the ground by two sets of galvanised steel rods. They counterbalance the weight of the longer arm that forms the gallery, a box inside the steel frame, with a glass end wall trained on the view of the green Luberon hills like a telescope, and no support in sight.

The next conversation was at the Rogerses’ house in Chelsea, London. It’s where McKillen, Rogers and his long-term collaborator Stephen Spence decided on the exact shade of orange to paint the steel. In working out the optimum size of the gallery, they looked close to home. The volume is 5m wide, the distance between the kitchen counter and the windows of the Rogerses’ house. It is also 4m high, matching their mezzanine, and 24m long, exactly twice the width of the room.

Making buildings that touch the ground as lightly as possible has always been as much a part of Rogers’ work as his love of bold colour, and making the most of a view, from the first house he built in Cornwall as a member of Team 4 with Norman Foster, to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The new gallery has all three attributes. Equally important to Rogers is the idea of rescuing the construction process from the messy uncertainty of a building site.

Another of Stephen Spence's early sketches for the project. The Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste is part of a growing list of work in France for the office, including: Maine Montparnasse masterplan, 2019-ongoing; Gare de Lyon Daumesnil masterplan, 2014-ongoing; Bercy Charenton masterplan, 2009-ongoing; The Roads of the Future Grand Paris, 2019; One Monte Carlo, 2019; Centre de conservation du Louvre à Liévin, 2019; Terminal 1 at Saint Exupéry Airport in Lyon, 2018; Grand Paris, 2013; European Court of Human Rights, 1995

The gallery, completed with the help of local architects Demaria Architecture, was prefabricated at the Bysteel factory in Portugal, a process that began with a team slicing through heavy steel tubes at precisely the right angle, with just a chalk mark for guidance. The next step was welding the major pieces together; no easy task, given that as the metal cools, the weld shrinks. Engineering consultant Michael Hasson, who guided the fabrication for Rogers, calls the skills demanded to get the steel to behave as needed ‘a collision between art and science’. João Manuel Faria de Sousa, who led the Bysteel team, recalls: ‘We had a 100 people working on the project. You could see their enthusiasm. It was like making a sculpture.’

With the kit complete, the pieces were bolted together in the factory to make sure everything fitted. Then they were dismantled, loaded onto two lorries, and driven to Château La Coste. For the last leg of the journey, the pieces were transferred from the trucks to a tractor trailer and moved to the site along a farm track, to be assembled with little more than a spanner, a cherry picker and a set of temporary supports.

Now that it’s finished, the gallery is a powerful summation of Richard Rogers’ work, as much as a place to enjoy the landscape around it, and the temporary exhibitions it will accommodate.

INFORMATION

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chateau-la-coste.com

The sound of a helicopter cuts through the pine-scented tranquility of the art and architecture-infused estate of Chateaû La Coste. Here in the hills of Provence among the vineyards, it is possible to find artworks by luminaries such as Tracey Emin and Andrew Goldsworthy, among others. A fabulous Sean Scully sculpture nestles at the base of the hill, where the artist’s distinctive squares work brilliantly in three dimensions, while elsewhere a pack of bronze foxes by Michael Stipe skulk silenty through the surrounding forest.
 
The architecture is equally impressive in the newly opened gallery space, La Bastide, the original house on the property dating from 1682. Here, Cy Twombly’s enlarged Polaroids are exquisite and there is a delicious satisfaction in seeing a photograph of grapes, a reference to the American painter’s Bacchus series, in a winery setting. Peonies (1980), too, is a masterpiece, and these ethereal works offer glimpses into the intriguing world of Twombly, an artist whose enigmatic paintings have demanded so much of art historians.

In one image, a Twombly sculpture appears against an Old Masters picture of a dog – the sense of harmony is tangible. In another photograph of his home in Bassanoin Teverina, doors open in part to reveal a portrait of woman by Picasso. Perhaps the most fascinating of all are those of the sea at Gaeta. Is this a clue as to where Twombly found his language, in the endless repeat of the waves?
 
The idyllic property is hosting two further exhibitions. In the wine store, New York-based Thomas Dozol is more direct in his series I‘ll be your mirror, which feature photographs the artist took of his subjects at a mirror without being included in the image. The artist”s development is clear, as he explores human movement, scale, colour and graphic design, taking these elements back into his most recent portraits.
 
However, the star of the day is Dublin-based artist Guggi, who is exhibiting in Renzo Piano’s magnificent Pavillon d’Exposition. His works are deceptively simple, created on humble brown distressed paper on which the artist has layered acrylic paint. The drawings occupy a place somewhere between figuration and abstraction, and the outcome is contemplative and beautiful. They mark a departure for Guggi, whose fascination with purity of form began in his upbringing among the puritanical Plymouth Brethren.

INFORMATION

‘Cy Twombly: Photographs’, ‘Thomas Dozol: I and Them 08/18’, and ‘Guggi: Broken’ are on view until 28 October. For more information, visit the Chateaû La Coste website

ADDRESS

Chateaû La Coste
2750 Route De La Cride
13610 Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

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Revealed earlier this month, a series of recent works by Giuseppe Penone is being exhibited in the Renzo Piano-designed pavilion at Château La Coste, the sumptuous Provençal property that combines vineyards, hospitality and large-scale contemporary art.

But before entering the compact architectural space – located just steps beyond Frank Gehry’s reconstructed Serpentine Pavilion from 2008 – visitors will confront two of Penone’s works that have been placed outside. The first consists of a barren bronze tree rising nearly 13m, into which a massive rock precariously nestles, with a second rock resting safely on the ground. The other is a giant slab of upright Carrara marble sculpted with veined patterning in low and high relief – either mimicking the stone itself or else a vaguely anthropomorphic reference.
 
If it seems obvious that these works are in dialogue with their surroundings – a leafless tree amid a verdant setting, the marble’s irregular peephole offering a picturesque view to an expanse of vines – Penone alternately points out his intention to communicate with the architecture. The slab, by complete coincidence, picks up the exact sloping line of Piano’s exterior concrete wall, while the tree begins another perspective line to his marble and bronze trunk sculpture at the rear side of the sunken building, where a narrow reflecting pool and grassy knoll fill the backdrop.
 
‘You see a link created with the elements of the space,’ notes the artist, who began his tireless career nearly 50 years ago as a young member of the Arte Povera movement. While the two Italian talents have known each other for some time, they have never directly collaborated; for the exhibition programme, the architect volunteered a sketch of the project.

Installation view of ‘Giuseppe Penone: Des Corps de Pierre’

Speaking with Wallpaper* from the lobby of the Villa La Coste hotel, perched above the pavilion, Penone explains how this presentation of eight works, including five recent drawings, furthers his expression of identity via elemental materials both large (one sculpture weighs nearly a tonne) and small (a natural grain of sand accompanied by a sculpted counterpart). Within the title Des Corps de Pierre (‘The Bodies of Stone’) is the notion that no two bodies – not natural river stones, not even pencil dots on paper – can be considered identical.
 
‘There is not a grain of sand that is identical to another. To try and make two identical grains, you introduce a system in the world that is completely artificial,’ he says, adding how this one – ostensibly identical to the human eye – involved the assistance of a nanotechnology expert in Grenoble and that future versions will be even more indistinguishable. ‘In language, there aren’t actually that many possibilities to recognise the visual characteristics [of stone] like with humans or animals. So we always try to understand these things with our own bodies and our thoughts.’
 
This sentiment accounts for his drawing of four coloured marks at the centre of a pointillist eye, as part of a series called Identità (‘Identity’). Arguably, however, within the context of Piano’s gallery, where natural light fills the space indirectly, Penone’s ideas need not be fully grasped to be appreciated. What registers most is how the compositions feel deeply grounded – or else penned to the walls – making his presence felt in ways both substantial and metaphysical.
 
His recurring depiction of trees confirms as much: ‘It’s a living form that memorises its entire existence in its structure. It’s a perfect sculpture that is able to show the necessity of its life. It’s this perfection that allows it to function anywhere – whether placed in a desert or a forest.’
 
On that note, once the exhibition ends and his trees have been uprooted, does Penone feel he will have left a trace on the property? ‘Of course,’ he replies enthusiastically. ‘I have been walking on the soil of the vines many times. That soil will remember that I have been there.’

INFORMATION

‘Giuseppe Penone: Des Corps de Pierre’ is on view until 26 November. The next exhibition at Château La Coste, ‘Your Way’ by Jeppen Hein, opens on 30 September. For more information, visit the Château La Coste website and the Marian Goodman Gallery website

ADDRESS

Château La Coste
2750 Route De La Cride
13610 Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

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Depending on your predilection, Château la Coste, located a little north of Aix-en-Provence, is either an estimable winemaker with a sideline in contemporary art or a marvel of modern architecture with an open-air gallery that just happens to have a vineyard attached. Whatever the case, the 200-acre estate owned by Irish property magnate Paddy McKillen is hugely impressive, a contemporary bedfellow to properties like Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Désert de Retz in Chambourcy.

McKillen’s ownership of la Coste began in 2002, after which he started installing art and architecture (both extant and commissioned) in response to the landscape and its winemaking history. A weighty book, titled, simply, Château la Coste, documents the recent history of the site in detail. It’s a beast: a 350-page volume crammed with sumptuous photography, contextual essays, diagrams and ephemera – self-congratulatory, perhaps, but deservingly so. There’s clearly been no expense spared: aside from the literal weight of the thing, the production values are notable, flitting between paper stocks and finishes, with supplementary pamphlet-style inserts on light, technical papers and loose single photographs and notebooks tucked inside each cover.

Following a preamble interview with McKillen and a florid introductory essay, a booklet of structural schematics gives immediate insight into the workings of the starchitects who've shaped la Coste, from spectral renders by Tadao Ando and Oscar Niemeyer to the more formal and meticulous diagrams of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (Jean Nouvel’s contributions are something of a mix).

One substantial photo section comprises artful, high-gloss shots of the site, its buildings and interventions. Many are straight-up architectural images; some are ostensibly bucolic landscapes. Others are more abstract and geometric, dare I say, Instagrammy: roof panels, piles of logs, waves of corrugated steel, that kind of thing. Captions are kept to the break pages, so flicking through these images feels like a meditative, meandering journey through the Château grounds, unencumbered by such fripperies as context and information. All are unpeopled (there’s a separate booklet with candid portraits of visitors and staff).

Picking through the meat of the book – 200-odd pages of photography and profile text on each artwork and structure – is an exhaustive undertaking. Even choosing highlights is nigh on impossible, given McKillen’s curatorial nous (and, we have to assume, expansive budget). The work is all fairly startling, from Ando’s minimalist entry portal right through to the Château's kitchen garden.

Along the way, we’re treated to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Mathematical Model 012, an example of the artist’s ‘science sculptures’; it rises from a shallow pool outside Ando’s Art Centre into an infinitesimal needle-point, positioned towards the firmament. Nearby, Alexander Calder’s primary-coloured Small Crinkly mobile shifts in the breeze. Embedded into a hillside across the estate is Andy Goldsworthy’s Oak Room, a haunting architectural installation responding to the topography (Goldsworthy is often creatively aligned with Land Artists like Richard Long). Though inconspicuous from the outside, its shadowy subterranean expanse is truly eerie, constructed from heavy, bare branches, dense and nest-like – not unlike True Detective’s Carcosa tunnels, if that’s your thing.

Elsewhere, Tracey Emin’s Self Portrait, Cat Inside a Barrel is a steel lookout platform sat between trees, a barrel containing a cat figurine featured at its tallest point. American sculptor Richard Serra has installed sheets of industrial steel into a hillside in his work Aix. And Tatsuo Miyajima has created a nocturnal LED work, bright pinpricks of green light appearing like fireflies as the sun fades (it’s dubbed Wild Flowers).

Even the most functional buildings are highly striking – particularly Frank Gehry’s angular, abstract Music Pavilion, seemingly constructed from a rough web of beams and girders, and Nouvel’s sheer, bunker-like wineries.

It’s a lot to take in, even in book form, but relentlessly intriguing as a snapshot of the upper echelons of late 20th- and early 21st-century sculpture and building. In the opening interview McKillen sums it up succinctly: ‘Château la Coste provides a beautiful context with a tremendous freedom to dream.’ By affording creative freedom to such an esteemed group of visionaries, he says, something rather special has been created. We’re inclined to agree.

At the time of Louise Bourgeois’ death in May 2010 a question mark hung over where one of the artist’s largest, most ambitious works would end up. I Do, I Undo, I Redo, an installation consisting of three 9m-tall steel towers that visitors could climb, created for the inaugural Tate Modern Turbine Hall exhibition exactly a decade earlier, had been packed away in storage since it was taken down.

In the year before Bourgeois’ death, Irish property developer and businessman Patrick McKillen went to visit her in New York to propose transporting the towers to her native France and installing them at McKillen’s 600-acre estate Château La Coste, an organic winery and expansive art and architecture park in the heart of Provence.

McKillen was already well acquainted with Bourgeois’ long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy, having bought a Crouching Spider – the first in a series of six and the only one in France – for Château La Coste some years earlier. You are greeted by the giant arachnoid sculpture rising from the reflecting pool in front of the Tadao Ando-designed Art Centre (housing the main reception and a restaurant) when you first enter the estate, which McKillen opened to the public in 2011. It was McKillen’s radical idea of installing the piece on the water that sold the deal to Bourgeois. Given she had been so happy with the idea, McKillen felt empowered to suggest another.

‘I was in New York for a friend’s 50th birthday,’ recalls McKillen. ‘I called Jerry to ask whether I could pop by and see him to buy a print for my friend and, while I was there, I asked him what had happened to those Tate towers. He told me they were in storage and that Louise wanted them to go to a museum, but it was unlikely any museum would be able to display them permanently. I suggested bringing them to France and installing them at La Coste,’ he continues. ‘Jerry liked the idea, but he didn’t think there was any chance of it happening.’

McKillen, collaborative by nature, called French architect Jean Nouvel and asked him to propose an environment to house the towers. Nouvel has been involved with Château La Coste since McKillen bought the property in 2002; he originally advised on a master plan for the estate and designed the pair of high-tech cylindrical steel chai de vinification buildings, unveiled in 2008. Nouvel’s idea was ambitious – to excavate an area of hillside high up on the estate overlooking the Puy-Sainte-Réparade valley and rebuild the shape of the hill over the top of the Bourgeois towers with an undulating concrete roof. It will be a feat of engineering when complete. A few months passed after Nouvel’s proposition was sent to Bourgeois and then Gorovoy got in touch to say she was very keen on the idea. ‘Jean was literally on the next flight to see her,’ says McKillen. ‘That encounter was filmed. Louise was very frail, but she lit up talking to Jean about the idea.’

Bourgeois died before the deal to bring I Do, I Undo, I Redo to La Coste was sealed. ‘After that, Jerry thought the estate would want it to go to the highest bidder, which meant it was way out of my reach,’ says McKillen. It was only after Bourgeois’ children saw the footage of their mother talking to Nouvel about the project, some months later, that Gorovoy called McKillen to tell him they had changed their minds.

Patrick McKillen – Paddy to his friends – is recounting this story sitting at what will be any art and food aficionado’s most coveted dining table. It is an intimate setting directly under another Bourgeois work McKillen acquired for La Coste, The Couple, 2007-2009. The polished aluminium piece hangs in the centre of a glass pavilion that echoes Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. Designed with The Couple in mind, it will house the fine dining restaurant at the new Villa La Coste, a luxury hotel launching on the Château La Coste estate comprising 28 villas. The hotel has been under construction for the duration of 2016 and is located close to the site that Nouvel earmarked for the towers, which are halfway through being installed. At present, hotel guests will get a unique view of Bourgeois’ I Do, I Undo, I Redo before the hill-shaped roof goes in next year.

Gérald Passédat will be at the helm of the Pavilion restaurant. It will be the first restaurant outside Marseille for the Michelin-starred chef, who owns the clifftop hotel Le Petit Nice. Passédat is celebrated for cooking inspired by the sea, but at the Pavilion he will follow in the spirit of La Coste – as the architects and artists invited to create installations do – and take inspiration from the Provençal countryside. ‘It is something different for me,’ says Passédat. ‘Rather than looking out to sea, I am searching for the finest ingredients from the land. It is going to be unique.’ McKillen conceived the design of Villa La Coste in collaboration with his in-house architects and the Marseille-based Irish architect Christopher Green. 

It is a simple, clean, elongated silhouette that blends discreetly into the landscape. Looking up from the Tadao Ando Art Centre, you could easily mistake the convex stone facade of Villa La Coste for another pavilion or site-specific installation. André Fu was appointed to work on specific interior elements – the spa, the bar, the library and the Pavilion restaurant. ‘It is a remarkable project to be part of,’ says Fu. ‘Château La Coste is home to projects from the likes of Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano. Paddy has access to just about any architect in the world. It is a huge privilege to be here. ‘La Coste has a very special atmosphere,’ Fu adds. 

‘I have responded to that, as well as the vision Paddy has for this hotel to be an extension of the general lifestyle at Château La Coste. A key thing is the sense of intimacy, which escalates into what I describe as a sense of relaxed luxury. It is about designing places around people and not just designing spaces purely for the spectacle.’

The hotel’s ‘villas’ – each sizeable suites – are arranged along a shaded avenue, with thyme and mint growing at ground level and jasmine climbing. All have a walled-in courtyard and those located on the upper part of the building have private plunge pools and breathtaking views of the Luberon. The lobby is halfway along what McKillen has named ‘the street’ and on entering it looks spectacular, but feels informal. McKillen is keen for barriers between guests and staff to be broken. Before he drove us up to the hotel, he stopped at the main entrance to the estate to make this point. There is no buzzer, no gate – simply two slabs of concrete that Tadao Ando conceived either side of the road. ‘I don’t want physical barriers between us and our visitors,’ says McKillen. ‘You will notice there are hardly any signs around the estate either. I want our guests to feel comfortable taking in the environment at their own pace.’

A new road has been laid to take guests up the hill to Villa La Coste; it winds past the property’s Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Vermentino vineyards (the estate produces some of the region’s finest organic wines through biodynamic practice). Look left on the way up and you’ll see Frank Gehry’s wooden and glass music pavilion, commissioned for the Serpentine Galleries but funded by and intended for Château La Coste. The estate undertakes outreach work with local schools, inviting them to use the pavilion for performances and lectures, and impromptu concerts by visitors often take place here. Look right on the way up and you can make out the path to Paul (grandson of Henri) Matisse’s aluminium Meditation Bell.

There is a more scenic walking route through the forest, where you pass Sean Scully’s stacked stone sculpture, weave through Richard Serra’s steel sheets and have the option of wandering further to take in Liam Gillick’s moving coloured screens, Lee Ufan’s chapel-like space, Andy Goldsworthy’s giant nest and the only architectural installation Tracey Emin has ever produced: an elevated wooden walkway leading to a wine barrel containing a ghostly porcelain cat. 

Once you arrive at the hotel you are surrounded by artworks from McKillen’s personal collection. On one wall in the lobby, pages from Bourgeois’ embroidered fabric book Ode à la Bièvre hang above a Charlotte Perriand table, with a Ron Arad ‘Rover’ chair to the side of it. The room’s centrepiece is a banquet-size wooden table by Nouvel with a polished stainless steel Tom Shannon sculpture on top (Shannon also has a large work in the park). Pierre Yovanovitch chairs, a Jean Royère sofa, and chairs designed by McKillen are arranged around the room. Behind the check-in area is a series of Alberto Giacometti sketches that had been in a vault for 40 years, while opposite is a David Douglas Duncan photo of Picasso in an Indian headdress (McKillen owns a selection of the photographer’s archive).

Elsewhere in the hotel there are Leger tapestries that came from the Seagram Building and a stained glass window based on the first Henri Matisse drawing McKillen acquired. In every guest room there are further artworks on display (Hiroshi Sugimoto, more Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Bernard Frize) as well as photographs of the artists and architects who have contributed to the estate, with pictures of them in situ while at work. The décor in the rooms is elegant and functional, with McKillen calling on Vietnamese design company District Eight (see W*205) to provide shelving, tables and chairs.

McKillen, who has interests in some of the best hotel properties in the world, especially in London – Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Berkeley – has project managed Villa La Coste himself. He is here every weekend overseeing all the elements, right down to the teapots you’ll pour from at breakfast and the books on the shelves in the rooms. His sister Mara, who has lived in Aix-en-Provence since 1990 and who discovered the historic estate for sale back in 2002, is heavily involved too. It is very much a family affair and McKillen has a long-serving and loyal team. His construction manager David Magill and surveyor Mark Allen have worked with him for years. ‘I like to keep the team small. I always say “don’t employ more than 11 because Jesus couldn’t handle 12”,’ he says, laughing.

McKillen is thoughtful and self-effacing; yet the passion and drive he dedicates to the ever-expanding project at Château La Coste is evident. While the hotel is receiving its finishing touches, his team is breaking ground on a number of new installations on the estate – one from Ai Weiwei, a collaboration between Tony Berlant and Frank Gehry, and three new museum buildings by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Oscar Niemeyer. The Niemeyer design was signed off literally days before he died in 2012. 

Then there is the ‘mini Roden Crater that James Turrell has submitted,’ McKillen says nonchalantly. ‘Fabrication is all done – we just need to do the excavation work to install it. We should have it done by next spring. It makes sense to get that done while the big machinery is on site.’ Magill, sitting opposite McKillen, looks a little alarmed.

André Fu gives us a quick preview of the spa, which will be completed by the end of the year, and, as he walks us down a grand spiral staircase, he says, ‘it is a very personal working relationship with Paddy. I was sitting with him having coffee this morning and I came up with a sketch for a small meditation garden on a scrap of paper, which we decided there and then that we’d implement.’

Things do seem to simply evolve organically and most artists and architects come back to work on further projects. ‘I feel lonely when they do a project and then just disappear,’ says McKillen

Some installations change track because McKillen is keen to try not to touch a tree on the estate. ‘We protect them as though they were children,’ he says. But this deeply personal project also has to make commercial sense. McKillen will make certain it is a self-sufficient business, if only to protect his own children. ‘The worrying thing for nutcases like me is what happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow,’ says McKillen. ‘I don’t want this to be a folly or burden for those left behind – Château La Coste has to sustain itself and feed the future. The winery and now the hotel has been set up to do exactly that.

As originally featured in the January 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*214)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Château la Coste website