Product details
- ISBN 9780755660469
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 134 x 214mm
- Publication Date: 18 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Maureen Emerson lived in Provence for 20 years, where she worked as a local co-ordinator for CBS and NBC at media festivals in Cannes. During her years in Provence, Maureen became enthralled with the stories of those expatriates who lived on the Riviera in the 1920s and 1930s and how World War II affected their lives. Her first book on the Riviera, Escape to Provence, was published in 2008.
