Riviera Dreaming : Love and War on the Cote d'Azur

Step inside the Riviera’s most glamorous villas and discover the real lives that shaped the Côte d’Azur’s golden age.

In 1926 Barry Dierks, a young American architect, arrived in Paris and fell in love with France. With his partner, an ex-officer in the British Army, he built a white, flat-roofed Modernist masterpiece that rested on the rocks below the Esterel, with views across the Mediterranean. They called it Le Trident.

Le Trident transformed their fortunes. As word spread, commissions poured in from across the Riviera’s social world. Dierks and Sawyer designed more than seventy of the coastline’s most recognisable houses, including Somerset Maugham’s La Mauresque, Jack Warner’s Villa Aujourd’hui, Maxine Elliott’s Château de l’Horizon, and the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s Villa Le Roc.

These villas became stages for Jazz Age decadence, intimate dramas, artistic breakthroughs, and the upheavals of war, revealing a Riviera far richer and stranger than its postcard image.

Bringing together vivid personalities, architectural insight and richly researched history, Riviera Dreaming captures a world where creativity, reinvention and intrigue collided on the edge of the Mediterranean.