W


hen people ask why I moved to the French Riviera, I say,


“Dennis Wheatley”. A mid-20th-century author


of decidedly ‘unwoke’ occult thrillers, is, I admit, an odd reason, but it is the truth, albeit not the whole truth. I must have been about 12 when I read To the Devil a Daughter, which is primarily set around Grasse, Cannes and the Estérel, a few years after the Second World War. Fascinated by Wheatley’s descriptions of the countryside, climate, food, people and their way of life, the region has interested me ever since. However, except for a few


business conferences in Nice and Monte Carlo, for a long time I didn’t have any real experience of the Riviera. All that changed in February 2018 when my wife and I attended a wedding at the Église Notre- Dame d’Espérence in Cannes, followed by a reception at the Carlton Hotel of To Catch a Thief fame. The weather was like a mild June day in London, and we were immediately smitten. Exploring the area by car, we determined to investigate a move when the time was right.


THE SEARCH BEGINS Three years later, after several visits back to the Riviera, we put our house in Luxembourg on the market and started looking in earnest for a place to buy in the Cannes and Antibes hinterland. Although there were lots of nice properties available, our budget, size, and location requirements were very specifi c, so that by the last day of our buying trip we had all but given up hope. Then we saw the bastide that would become our new home. Our house is south-facing


and partly cut into the rock of a steep hillside, making it cool in the summer and heat-retaining in winter. The bastide lies in Magagnosc, one of the three ‘Hamlets of Grasse’, just east of the city. This semi-rural area has a gentle climate, ideal for growing the violets and other fl owers used in the manufacture of the perfumes for which Grasse is so famous. So why did we fall in love


with the bastide? Well… it was


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Lewis writing in the open air outside his home


The sweet smell of success in Grasse


When published author Lewis Hinton moved to perfume capital Grasse, he found the perfect place to write his novels


a former bakery built in 1700 so our furniture matched the oak-beamed rooms perfectly; the terraced garden and pool looked manageable and were beautifully laid out; the views across the Bay of Cannes and Massif de l’Estérel were spectacular; there were self- contained apartments we could rent out; and last but not least,


60 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: September/October 2023


the property was big enough to house our ever-growing family should they come visiting en masse. I remember asking my parents why they retired to a creekside house in Cornwall. “So you and your family will come and visit in the holidays.” We also liked the bastide’s


interesting quirks, such as an original bread oven hewn from


the rock now converted into a wine cellar, and a series of holes under the eaves forming an 18th-century ‘telegraph’, where homing pigeons would be dispatched with messages to order more supplies of fl our, yeast, salt, and so on. The garden pond is home to Max, a koi carp that I am told is 80 years old and has lived through


© LEWIS HINTON


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