Riviera Dreaming: Love and War on the C�te d'Azur

In 1926, a young American architect and his lover, an ex-officer in the British Army, moved to the south of France and built a white, flat-roofed Modernist masterpiece that rested on the rocks below the Esterel, with views across the Mediterranean. They called it Le Trident. From the moment it was built, it captivated Riviera society. Noel Coward called it "impossibly beautiful" and its guest book became filled with the Riviera beau monde.

As commissions for more villas flooded in, Barry Dierks and Eric Sawyer became the "darlings of the Riviera." Over the years, Dierks would design and build more than 70 of the Riviera's most recognisable villas for clients: ranging from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque and Jack Warner's Villa Aujourd'hui to the Marquess of Cholmondeley's Manoir Eden Roc and Maxine Elliott's Château de l'Horizon.

Riviera Dreaming tells the dazzling story of the lives, loves, and adventures that played out behind the walls of these stunning houses and provides an unparalleled portrait of life on the Cote d'Azur at the height of the Jazz Age.