Villa les Mouettes

Villa les Mouettes stands on a corner plot in Menton, set back from the street behind a 270-square-metre garden. Built at the very start of the twentieth century, it is one of the Belle Époque holiday homes of the Riviera. Stone walls, a nearly square footprint and a tile-covered pavilion roof with visible rafters define the building. A straight staircase climbs from the street to the garden and the main entrance. A bay window with a balcony breaks up the front, and ironwork balustrades edge the other openings. Right under the eaves, you can make out a painted frieze running along the facade.

From 1914 the sculptor Léopold Bernstamm made this house his home. He had come from Riga to Paris in the late nineteenth century and worked as chief sculptor at the Musée Grévin. In 1921 he gave the city three hundred busts, statues, statuettes and models. A gallery devoted to his work opened at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in January 1923. A plaque on the south facade commemorates his years in the house. Guillaume Cerutti-Maori, a fresco painter from a family of Italian artists, is credited with the painted decoration. He is known for some five hundred painted friezes on buildings in Menton and the surrounding area. With the architect Abel Glena he often collaborated, and his workshop employed about a hundred people until the First World War ended.

In September 1990 the French state listed the decorated facades and the roof as historic monuments. Since March 2001 it has also carried the Patrimoine du XXe siècle label. Under those eaves, the painted seagulls have kept their place for more than a hundred years.