In May 1871 Charles Garnier settled on a plot above the Arziglia at Bordighera, and to get it he offered the town council 6,000 lire plus the free design of a new school: a boys' section, a girls' section and a kindergarten. The site was taken up by an old chapel of St Sebastian, deconsecrated and used as the village boys' school, and faced with that offer the council agreed. The architect of the Paris Opéra was on the Riviera because his building site had stopped with the war against Prussia and the Commune; he had moved to Menton, his wife Louise Bary's home town. The villa was finished in 1873, but the family's first winter there came only in January 1875.
What to see
From a distance you pick out the tower, as slim as a minaret: the one surviving preparatory drawing shows Moorish arches that were never built, though the proportions stayed. Garnier called it Mon mirador, for the view. Inside, three floors are linked by a wooden staircase ordered from Paris to save money which, between freight and customs, ended up costing 1,000 crowns against the 75,000 spent on the whole house. The entrance loggia, now glazed in, keeps frescoes and caricatures left by his painter friends: Meissonier, Boulanger, Lenepveu, Bida, Clairin. The grated corridor the owners called the Cage aux lions is now a chapel, and carries the fresco of the villa as it stood in the nineteenth century.
There were plenty of outbuildings: Garnier bought up land and houses around him through 29 deeds of purchase. Villa Negro, acquired in 1877, became a hammam on the family doctor's advice, with a calidarium, a tepidarium and a pool just 50 cm deep for the mirror effect. Villa Studio, at number 22 of today's via Garnier, was the only one built from scratch: in 1884, as his son Christian's health worsened, the father handed him his own study and made himself another. When Garnier died in August 1898, and Christian soon after, his widow Louise could not face going back in: she left the house untouched and moved to Villa Amica.
Visiting
The address is via Charles Garnier, outside the old walls, on the slope running down to the fishermen's beach of the Arziglia; the villa and Villa Amica are both under heritage protection. Louise left the house to the Société de Géographie in Paris along with the furniture, the books and 200,000 francs for its upkeep, on condition that it never be sold: in 1929 it was sold all the same, to the American art critic John Hemming Fry. It passed to the diocese of Ventimiglia and, from 1954, to the Sisters of St Joseph of Aosta, who run it as a guest house. This is not a museum with a ticket desk: for the interiors, ask ahead.
Our editors' tip
We suggest a good half hour walking up via Garnier and reading the street numbers: number 2 is Villa Amica, 22 is Villa Studio, 42 is Villa Modesta. In a few hundred metres you can piece together the little colony the architect built around himself. Then climb to the Pineta del Capo, where on 28 April 1935 Hemming Fry had a monument to Garnier put up: from up there you understand why a man with Paris at his feet chose this stretch of coast.