When Ferdinand Bac began work on the residence that would become Les Colombières in the early 1920s, he wasn’t just designing a house in the hills above the coastal city of Menton in southern France—he was creating a place where architecture, interior spaces, and gardens function as a single, continuous composition.

As reported by the New York Times, the German-born artist first came across the property in 1919 while searching for a winter home for friends, industrialist Émile Ladan-Bockairy, and his wife, Caroline-Octavie. The couple soon acquired the property and commissioned Bac, a writer, illustrator, and grandson of Jérôme Bonaparte—the youngest brother of Napoleon I—to develop it. He became deeply enmeshed in the project, which was largely completed in 1927.

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According to current owner Michael Likierman, founder of the Habitat furniture company, Bac lived at Les Colombières from 1924 to 1939, using it as both a residence and a studio to work out his artistic ideas. During his time there, the estate drew a steady stream of notable visitors, including writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and World War I hero Marshal Joseph Joffre.

The house measures about 5,800 square feet and is laid out as a series of interconnected spaces rather than a formal layout. It has four bedroom suites, including a primary suite that opens to a terrace facing the sea. 

A lot of Bac’s original work is still there, with frescoes he painted across the main rooms and bedrooms, along with mosaic details and arched openings influenced by Italian and Moorish design. Painted panels based on mythology and scenes from his travels in Spain and North Africa still line several of the reception spaces.

The property covers roughly 7.4 acres, which Bac broke up into a sequence of outdoor spaces connected by paths and staircases, adding elements like pergolas, fountains, and obelisks to shape how you move through the site. Some of those features are set up to play with perspective, with terraces and sightlines that draw your focus out toward the water. The planting sticks mostly to Mediterranean species, including cypress, olive, and pine.

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Though it was used during World War II as a convalescent home for Italian soldiers and later operated as a bed-and-breakfast, which left parts of it worn down, Les Colombières stayed in the Ladan-Bockairy family until 1995. The Likiermans bought the property that year and moved in after completing a five-year renovation that reportedly cost about 4 million euros.

Now protected in full as a French historic monument, the property also includes a 49-foot heated pool, a roughly 1,000-square-foot caretaker’s house, and two additional apartments for staff or guests. Les Colombières is listed with Savills at 11.5 million euros, or about $13.5 million.

Click here to see more photos of this French Riviera property.