The Palais Bulles: the house without a single right angle

Théoule-sur-Mer, above the red Estérel. The Palais Bulles has no straight walls, no angles, no rectangular doors: here the Hungarian architect Antti Lovag pushed his fixed idea to its limit — man is not made to live in boxes.

Cellular architecture

Begun in 1975 for an industrialist, completed and enlarged by Pierre Cardin, who bought it in 1992, the palace lines up its bubbles of sprayed concrete across ten levels: 1,200 m², twenty-eight round rooms, portholes everywhere, a 500-seat amphitheatre carved into the hillside. Lovag drew no plans — he bent the reinforcement on site, by instinct.

The Cardin manifesto

For the couturier of geometric haute couture, the bubble house was self-evident: the future, in a habitable version. He staged shows and parties there; Dior would present its 2016 cruise collection on the spot. Valued in the hundreds of millions, regularly up for sale, the palace remains one of the most singular pieces of real estate in Europe.

The legacy

Partly listed as a monument historique since 2016, the Palais Bulles rehabilitated a whole lineage: Häusermann, the Unal house, the bubble architectures of the 1970s — which the market is rediscovering today.

Does the curved furniture of the 1970s speak to you? Scan a piece on Beyit: the original, the era, the value.