Near Monte Carlo, a Brutalist Abode Unlike Its Neighbors

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/t-magazine/tom-dixon-house-monte-carlo.html

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THE BRITISH PRODUCTION DESIGNER Tom Dixon has always taken autodidacticism to extremes. At secondary school in Northern England during the 1970s, he learned to throw clay pots on a wheel. Just the year before, he had picked up a Vox Panther bass; the punk-tinged disco band that he started, Funkapolitan, opened for the Clash in the early 1980s. When a motorcycle accident trashed his bike around that time, he grabbed a blowtorch and fixed it with little formal training, which led to welding scrap metal into furniture during the day while playing gigs at night.

It was this air of reckless innovation that caught the attention of a woman from Monaco. One evening in 1981, when Funkapolitan was performing in the South of France, the woman, a member of one of Monte Carlo’s prominent families, noted his jaunty style. Unlike some of the more conventional scions of Monaco society — the country, which has the world’s highest wealth per capita, has only 38,400 residents — she had by her early 20s developed an appreciation for the avant-garde, from Brian Eno to Robert Mapplethorpe.

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A year or so later, she read in a magazine that Dixon, who is now 60, had left music to build a multidisciplinary design business out of a defiantly ragged garage in Notting Hill, London, that he called Space (other artisans worked alongside him, incubating a new generation of British design that’s still influential today). She soon became an early collector of his furniture: With its obvious seams and wild mix of nuts and bolts — old sewage parts for backrests, stolen manhole covers as seats — it was a rebuke to the era’s chrome-and-black-leather yuppie aesthetic. “She was intentionally obscure, which I found admirable,” Dixon says.

The two stayed close, swapping inspirations and visiting when they could. At 25, she married a fellow Monegasque she’d known since childhood, someone as eccentric as she, and moved to a grand apartment in a high-rise overlooking Monte Carlo’s harbor. They spent their time traveling the world, befriending artists such as the surrealist American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and the Italian post-Memphis sculptor Andrea Branzi. Along with Dixon’s work, they amassed pieces by other emerging radical designers of the late 20th century, including the London-based sculptor Ron Arad and the Dordogne, France-based furniture maker André Dubreuil, who fashioned giant clocks and imposing Asian lanterns that appeared both gothic and futuristic. “She was really one of the first adopters of post-postmodern punky stuff,” Dixon says.

Meanwhile, the designer had made a name for himself. After creating the sinuous S chair and licensing it to Cappellini in 1990, his subsequent pieces, including the 1996 polyethylene Jack, a stackable lamp that resembles a cartoon version of the classic metal toy, established Dixon as a juggernaut of industrial design. In 1998, he was named the creative director of Habitat, the then foundering British furniture conglomerate begun in the 1960s by Sir Terence Conran. Dixon ran it until 2008, when he left to launch his eponymous brand of mostly metal (often copper) lighting, chairs and other furnishings.

ONE NIGHT IN 2010, while he and the woman from Monte Carlo were having dinner in London, she offered Dixon a commission that would test even his robust enthusiasm for learning on the job. She and her husband wanted him to design a villa for them on a spectacular cliff-side site just yards beyond the principality’s border in Cap d’Ail, France. At the time, the spot was occupied by a sort of shepherd’s hut surrounded by lemon trees, built in the late 19th century by her great-grandfather. Her family used it as a getaway from the city; she had spent summers there as a teenager, picking tomatoes and looking after an aging tortoise.

Dixon had visited the property in the 1980s, after the woman had taken it over from her father; he had even made some custom furniture for it. But that was far different than designing a residence from the ground up for a client with notoriously outré tastes. Though he had developed an interior design practice alongside his product empire, he had no architectural training. But such concerns didn’t faze the woman. She didn’t even feel the need to give him much direction. “Tom knew me,” she says. “He knew what I liked. I knew he was the person to make it.”

Dixon understood that the woman wanted a house with an uncompromising Brutalist edge, in stark contrast to the lavish but architecturally mundane buff-colored, orange-tile-roof mansions found along the rocky promontory. He approached the design as he would a lamp or a chair — as though the home were both sculpture and functional object. “I thought about creating these very basic geometric shapes, then fusing them together,” he says. But he was also cognizant of the setting, with its combination of craggy natural beauty and extreme overdevelopment. “I wanted the house to have the feel of a bunker, to be a statement about the monolithic beauty of the place, like the battlements at Carcassonne,” he says, referring to the sprawling walled fort in Occitanie, which was built in the Gallo-Roman period and restored in the mid-19th century by the French architectural theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

He also thought that the 11,000-square-foot house, which took nearly five years to finish (the owners moved in six years ago in the midst of construction), should have elements of a nuclear reactor or an observatory — conveying threat and mystery, at least from afar — and crowned it with a 30-foot-tall dome that challenges all ideas of right angles in a residence. (Dixon himself lives with his family in a 60-foot-tall converted 1930s concrete water tower in North Kensington that he transformed in 2005 into a three-story house with a spiral staircase running up its center.) “I am not afraid of round,” he says. “Though it is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to placing furniture.”

A desire to allude to Monte Carlo’s risqué midcentury glamour also inspired the house’s Bond-villain-like flourishes, including a vast, dramatically lit subterranean garage, painted a menacing dark blue, where the couple keeps their collection of sports cars and motorcycles. “We wanted to thumb our nose a bit at the castle,” Dixon says, referring to the city’s dignified, massive Grimaldi family home, built in the 12th century and still occupied by Prince Albert II. “We changed almost nothing from what Tom proposed,” adds the owner. “I felt as though my job was to make it come true.”

AFTER CONSTRUCTING a maquette, Dixon drew up plans with a series of British architects, each eventually “coming to sticky ends” as they threw their hands up in despair at the complexity. The notoriously picayune French zoning laws dictated height and sightlines and eventually quashed plans for the spare, desertlike landscaping that the owner hoped would provide a counterpoint to the lush local vegetation: Authorities did allow a cactus garden that leads up to the street-side entrance, but the rest of the property features maples, mimosas and fragrant herbs planted by the Parisian landscape architect Michel Desvigne, a frequent collaborator of the Italian architect Renzo Piano. Midway through the project, Dixon discovered that they were in an earthquake zone, so they had to triple the thickness of some of the house’s concrete walls, which also doubled the cost.

Amazingly, the owners never wavered; the woman from Monaco became her own general contractor, overseeing a platoon of craftsmen at every step. “I tend to blast through things and move on,” Dixon says, “but she was committed to doing whatever needed to be done to make it perfect.” He sent mood boards for the interiors, but instead of providing her with a wonkish set of specifications to go along with them, he leaned toward the poetic in his instructions, relying on her to interpret and hone his desires. “Sometimes I would ask him how he wanted a wall finished or how to treat the surface,” she says, “and he would respond with a piece of music or a photograph of Brian Eno’s haircut.”

The house, which the owner named Cactus Dorée, was constructed in Le Corbusier’s favored method, called shuttering: a wooden frame clad with wood-grained concrete, fabricated by pouring the substance into timber molds and letting it set. Many of the inside surfaces are made the same way, amplifying the Brutalist aura. Expanses of glass punctuate the exterior and allow the bleached Mediterranean sun to seep into the 20-by-30-foot living area, which looks out over the long narrow ledge of pool to the harbor. Sitting on the serpentine dark green leather custom Dixon sofa, which is segmented like a caterpillar, or on chaise longues by the Scandinavian masters Finn Juhl and Alvar Aalto (virtually all the furniture was amassed by the owners during construction), you can glimpse the castle in the distance. Their collection of art and objects, which range from Ming dynasty vases and vintage Gibson guitars to early 20th-century drawings by Jean Cocteau and a quartet of watercolor portraits from the early 2000s by the contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, heighten the dwelling’s idiosyncrasy.

In fact, quirks abound. The owner herself is a photographer, and Dixon built her a studio and darkroom on the top floor of the house. Along the 20-foot-long passage to the master bedroom, there’s an antique oak cabinet de curiosité that once stored butterfly specimens in London’s Natural History Museum but now functions as storage for shoes, bags and books. The bedroom itself is contained by the zinc-covered concrete dome, with motorized curved doors of perforated aluminum that open to a vast, circular outdoor terrace. The en suite shower is a marble chute that rises just as high, topped with an oculus. The bed is flanked by matte-black custom tables and lamps by Philippe Malouin, the young British designer who is Dixon’s protégé.

Even the boiler room at one end of the garage has been deeply considered. The maze of copper pipes leading to the water heater is polished to a reflective sheen, and there is a grid of framed photos taken by NASA in the ’60s. On terrazzo flooring rescued from Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2 during its 2009 renovation by the English architect Norman Foster — “I love how all the world has walked on it, kings and immigrants,” the owner says — sits a simple steel chair by Dixon, made for a 2012 installation at Salone del Mobile, the Milan furniture fair. It is one of only two chairs of his she still owns; all the early ones were sold at stunning profit years ago, once the designer became famous. That decision didn’t insult Dixon in the slightest. “She always wants to move forward,” he says.

He, too, is surging ahead with a renewed sense of self-taught zeal. The house tested Dixon’s skills as a designer, but it also inspired him to reconfigure his studio and staff to better accommodate architectural commissions. “There is no way I would have thought of making a house, ever, if she hadn’t asked me to do this,” he says. “So you could call it a master class. Or you could just call it completely insane.”