VILLA GALAXIE

Villa Galaxie

Visiting the French answer to California's Case Study architecture program.

Mid century modern perfection in the mountains above Cannes, a part of France more commonly dominated by a traditional terracotta-roofed Mediterranean look than anything resembling this, the Villa Galaxie. Built in the early 1960s, it was very intentionally designed to offer a French perspective on California’s contemporary architecture scene, defined chiefly by the Case Study House Program and widely publicised projects by Richard Neutra and John Lautner.

Original owners Georges and Ully Jalou were important figures in the world of French fashion publicity, they were great admirers of the movements taking off in America at the time and they will have been acutely aware of the role that architectural media was playing in the popularisation of those movements.

The Case Study Program in particular was bankrolled by a magazine, to whom the quality of the final photography was equally as important as the quality of the construction. You could argue that a project like the Stahl House wouldn’t have achieved anywhere near the fame that it did were it not for a handful of iconic photographs by Julius Shulman. Photography and its public consumption was exercising more influence on architecture than ever before, spreading this Californian appeal to even the distant European fashion elite who responded in turn with their own take on the Case Study Program “look”.

For decades the Villa Galaxie served as an oceanside getaway for the Jalou family and a social hub for the well-to-do of the French Riviera. It represented the height of style and technology at the time and continues to channel that sense of mid-century elegance six decades later, preserved with many of its original fixings and features. For our visit, we chose to capture it in the only way that made sense, enlisting medium format film photographer Thomas Francius to replicate that period architectural mag feel, allowing us to experience it in just the way it was meant to be.