Sprawled on the luxurious French Riviera, the iconic Palais Bulles, or “Bubble Palace” sits empty. The eclectic home priced at a staggering $420 milllion (USD) was built in 1975, taking nearly 14 years to construct. The home was designed by Hungarian architect Antti Lovag for the French industrialist Pierre Bernard, who later sold it to iconic designer Pierre Cardin in 1992. Despite being an architectural genius, Lovag’s client list was rather small. This was largely in part to his three philosophical principles of architecture: he does not know what the end product will look like, when it will be completed, or how much it would cost.
Although Cardin never actually lived in the home and treated it as a summer destination, he would frequently rent it out for a mind-blowing $33,000 a day. This cultural hub would be the center of luxurious parties, film screenings (yeah… this place had a theatre too) and runways - including Raf Simons', 2016 Dior Cruise Collection.
What made this iconic home so special, also made it nearly inhabitable. To Lovag, the “straight line” was “an aggression against nature.” He firmly believed that architecture should be seen as a “form of play - spontaneous, joyful and full of surprise.” He also added that “whether for economic reasons or lack of technical solutions, human beings have confined themselves to cubes full of dead ends and angles that impede our movement and break our harmony”. Herein lies the problem.
This home is undoubtedly an architectural masterpiece and a work of art - but it has very little functional purpose as it stands. To start, the home would need tens of millions more in upgrades just to be liveable. Pair that with a price tag of nearly half a billion dollars, and the picture starts to become more clear. As brilliant as it is, there are very few people in the world who have the budget to spend this type of money on a luxury summer home.
Although not ideal for living, it would be a real shame to see such a magnificent piece of architecture fall by the wayside. There has been a heavy push in recent years to have the house transformed into an art gallery for public viewing. Some say it should be turned into a venue to host parties and various social events. Although the future of Palais Bulles is uncertain, one thing is for certain -- it would be a real shame to see this work of art lost to time.
