Tina Turner’s House in the South of France

This article originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Architectural Digest.

It's a day before the last solar eclipse of the millennium, and France, like most of Europe, is a little crazy. Everyone is watching the weather channel, listening to kooks predicting an apocalypse and frantically trying to find a pharmacy that hasn't sold out its stock of protective glasses.

In the hills above the Riviera, the serpentine lanes that lead to the great villas are clogged with catering vans and limos as last-minute guests arrive from the Nice airport for parties. In one of the most fabulous of those villas, commanding a hilltop, Tina Turner—radiant in white muslin—is setting up her telescope on the terrace. She happens to know a thing or two about eclipses, celestial and personal. And she knows from experience that the sun comes out again.

Turner has herself just driven south from her primary residence in Switzerland and is expecting friends from London, Paris and New York. It's a somewhat inopportune moment for a leisurely house tour, though not only because of the eclipse. She is preparing to launch her first new album in three years—Tina Twenty Four Seven—and she's been playing the sound track with a critical ear while steeling herself for the rigors of a world tour. As soon as the king of the heavens has finished his star turn, the queen of rock will start hers: posing for photographers and rehearsing her new music video. But Turner is a grande dame in every respect, and her native southern warmth coincides with an acquired European politesse. Despite the presence of an entourage and the impending invasion of a film crew, she's relaxed and gracious.

There are few women of any age who have the charisma of Turner at sixty. What's surprising is that the allure of the private woman is so different from the glamour of the diva. There is not, for example, a sequin in her closet. "I'm not that person," she says with a laugh, flinging open the doors to a dressing room filled with white blossoms and an antique court fan and decorated in shades of cream. "I don't even wear colors. My work is noisy, but my life is quiet. I need nature and solitude—they nurture me. My idea of a vacation is reading a book on the terrace while my boyfriend cooks us dinner."

Turner likes rustic cuisine, but her taste in reading, as in décor, proves to be quite mandarin: She admires the classicism of Greece and Rome, collects Chinese art and studies Buddhism—though she doesn't flaunt her practice. The electric body is the vessel for a grounded soul.

The singer moved to Europe some twelve years ago with her companion, Erwin Bach, a marketing director with EMI Records. Her career, which had suffered an eclipse after her divorce from Ike Turner, was revived abroad, then reimported triumphantly to the States. This has been the trajectory of many great expatriate artists, particularly musicians, and while she's deeply gratified by the popularity of her recordings in America—and of her searing autobiography, I Tina, adapted for the screen as What's Love Got to Do With It—she retains a deep sense of loyalty to her foreign fans.

While she and Bach were living in Germany, Turner's manager introduced her to the south of France, and she subsequently rented a "little pink house" near the summit she now inhabits. But the glittering and rather decadent social life of the coastal resorts never appealed to her. "The Cap is Beverly Hills," she declares, "and that's what I fled. When we heard that this property was for sale, we were told that angels live here,' and we laughed about it. But in fact it's a very spiritual place—between two mountains, surrounded by woods that are full of wildlife—and that's essential to me. I was raised in the country, come from a Bible-reading family and grew up on church music. My mother's Indian side has given me a different kind of religious heritage. Up here the wind and clouds breeze through the house, and the sky makes mesmerizing pictures. I can watch them for hours."

Turner's villa, like Turner herself, has, she says, gone through a number of "incarnations" before acquiring its present character, in which grandeur is balanced by informality. "A great interior has to coalesce," she says. "When I see something I love—a suite of furniture, a piece of art—I never measure, I never hesitate, I just buy it. Eventually I'll find a place for it. I have strong tastes—and big storerooms. I've always wanted and needed to transform my surroundings, because decorating is my first response to loss and upheaval; settle, collect—create a private universe. I was a little girl when my parents separated, and I moved in with relatives, claiming a back room in their house. I brought a bedspread from home and a few treasures. Even though it was freezing in winter and broiling in summer—and no bigger than a closet—I made it a place of my own. And that's what I've always done on tour—rearrange the hotel furniture, sheet the ugly paintings. But getting things perfect in a house this scale was taking me too long. Eventually I saw that I needed professional help—the right kind for me."

After a vacation in Aspen, Colorado, where she stayed in the splendid neo-Baroque manor of her friends Jim and Betsy Fifield (see Architectural Digest, March 1999), Turner contacted their designers, Stephen Sills and James Huniford. From their first meeting she "felt instinctively" she could work with them, and they, says Huniford, "having always loved her music, immediately adored her."

"I let them try things." Turner smiles. "They never push. I'll say to them: Yes, let's do it; no thanks, I've been there'—we work from feelings. It's like mixing a CD."

"The boys," as she calls them fondly, have in the past decade become the young old masters of interior design, famous for patrician interiors that integrate antiques of exalted provenance and furnishings from the great modernist and Art Déco designers with a rigorous sense of history. Their penchant is for classicism, though they stress the fact that "every commission is different, because our job is to interpret how a client wants to live." "Designing involves culture, intuition, artisanship and an ideal of transparency, which I can best compare to the art of literary translation," Sills says. "Your sensibility functions like a prism. In working with Tina, who's a natural-born decorator, it was really a matter of helping her to find her own voice—to express her own style—rather than to impose ours. We toured museums together, went shopping on the quai Voltaire in Paris, exchanged books and ideas—which Tina accepted or rejected, as it suited her—and we helped to edit her collections. But she was the mastermind of this house: It's her own invention."

Early on in what Huniford calls their "visual journey together," the designers took Turner to visit the fin de siècle Villa Kérylos in nearby Beaulieu, built by the erudite French Hellenist Théodore Reinach, modeled after the houses of ancient Delos and decorated with meticulously faithful reproductions of Attic furnishings, art, mosaics, frescoes and fixtures. "It was an inspiration to me," says Turner. And the architecture of her own villa pays homage to the classical style in its terraced amphitheater; its stenciled plasterwork; the graceful disposition of Greek and Roman pottery and sculpture; the columned pool loggia and terraces—sheltered from the mistral and the sun by canvas shades bordered with a Greek-key motif—and chandeliers of bronze and alabaster adapted from the Villa Kérylos by Sills and Huniford.

They had, says Huniford, also encouraged Turner to treat her interiors with the same Neoclassical spareness that Reinach and his Italian architect had achieved in Beaulieu, though she demurred. "I felt those furnishings, copied from villas in Herculaneum and Egypt, among other places, were just too small in scale," she explains. And one day on a shopping trip with "the boys" in Paris, she "fell in love" with a sumptuous (and fabulously costly) suite of gilt Louis Philippe fauteuils and canapés—twenty-two pieces in all, excluding, however, the king's bed, which was in the Louvre. "You can't buy it before we try it!" Sills pleaded with her. "I didn't care," Turner continues. "I wasn't intimidated by the fact that it was palace furniture. It's beautiful, it's comfortable, and it set the tone for the whole house."

It was Turner's idea as well to commission a dining table of ebony inlaid with bronze from the French sculptor and furniture designer André Dubreuil, who had also worked with the Fifields, and to accent her nineteenth-century royal seating with Art Déco side tables of bronze and marble. In an alcove off the living room, she asked Sills and Huniford to create a small library where she could write and study on an antique card table surrounded by her leather-bound volumes on art, religion and ancient history. A plush basement spa, with adjacent screening and trophy rooms, were also, of course, de rigueur for a star of Turner's stature, who doesn't like to leave home, "except maybe to walk down the hill to a local restaurant." The designers hung her collections of black-and-white photographs and stringed instruments throughout the house.

Every major room of the multilevel villa, which was designed by architect Bruno Guistini, opens to a patio or balcony where one can dine, sunbathe or lounge—that is, after all, the point of living atop a cliff on the Riviera. And off the master suite, with its Egyptian palette of flax and kohl and its dramatic bed of hand-forged bronze, with sensuous hangings of silken rope, is a secluded terrace with an endless view of the sea. "This is my refuge," says Turner, curling up on a rattan divan—"my favorite spot in the house. I call it Cleopatra's barge." Her casual confidence, delivered in the famous voice of grit and velvet, suddenly illuminates much about the coincidence—in house and owner—of extravagance with humility, the voluptuous with the spiritual. The diva's affinity with the queen of the Nile and high priestess of Isis is irresistible.

She too was an ageless beauty living at the beginning of a millennium. She believed in dreams and studied ancient cultures. Her subjects worshiped her as a goddess. She knew the vicissitudes of love, exile, violence and celebrity, and she survived dethronements to reclaim her power. Not much could intimidate her—certainly not the price tag of a daybed, a campaign or a love affair. Throughout eclipses she kept her faith.

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