Villas of Cap d'Antibes: Warner, the Duke of Windsor, Koum
Cap d’Antibes is the peninsula between Antibes and Juan-les-Pins where the most private residences on the French Riviera sit within a few square kilometres. Newspaper magnates, Hollywood producers, an abdicated British king, Greek shipowners and technology founders have followed one another behind those gates. Here are the stories the documents actually support.
🏛 Who pieced these histories together
The biographer Nathalie Aguado spent two years in the archives — from cadastral records to unpublished family papers — and published Secrets des villas du Cap d’Antibes with Akinomé. A sequel followed in June 2026, Cap d’Antibes: les artisans du rêve, about the people who dreamed the houses up rather than the walls themselves. Between them the books cover the oldest residences such as l’Héloïse, the grand villas Eilenroc and des Pins, and the Château de la Garoupe.
💎 Villa Aujourd’hui: modernism on the rock
The villa was built in 1938 to a design by the American architect Barry Dierks for Audrey Chadwick, a socialite from Palm Beach. It is one of the last examples of the modernist style — with art deco touches — to go up on the Riviera before the war, and today it carries the French Remarkable Contemporary Architecture label. Around 1950 the house was bought by Jack Warner, one of the brothers behind Warner Bros.
🔍 The ring on the bay floor
In June 1952 Warner was swimming off Cap d’Antibes and lost a platinum ring set with stones. On 30 June the newspaper L’Aurore reported that the piece was valued at 3.5 million francs and that the producer had promised 400,000 francs to the divers of the Juan-les-Pins club for its recovery. Whether it was ever found, the record does not say.
🏰 Château de la Croë: from the Duke of Windsor to seizure
The château was built in 1927 to a design by Armand-Albert Rateau for Sir Pomeroy Burton, general manager of Associated Newspapers. In May 1938 the Duke and Duchess of Windsor — the abdicated Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson — took the lease. They left in June 1940, returned in 1946 and found the place wrecked: it had served as barracks through the war. The lease ran out in spring 1949; the château then belonged to Aristotle Onassis, to his long-standing rival Stavros Niarchos, and from 2001 to Roman Abramovich, who put some £30 million into restoring it. In April 2022 the French state seized the property under sanctions.
💻 La Garoupe: from Berezovsky to the WhatsApp founder
The Château de la Garoupe, designed by the British painter-architect Ernest George, was bought in 1999 by Boris Berezovsky for around 24 million dollars. In the autumn of 2023 the estate passed to Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp, in a deal valued at close to 70 million dollars.
📜 Why they keep coming back
Cap d’Antibes has held its status for a century, and the views are only part of it: the peninsula offers what Cannes and Nice cannot — seclusion half an hour from the airport. Only the means of guarding it have changed. Where Warner advertised a reward in the papers, today’s owners hide behind holding companies.
We have written about other landmark residences on this coast in our piece on the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, and about change in Antibes itself in the history of its marine park.
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Photo: Ahmet ÇÖTÜR / Pexels