The Five Summer Homes of the Jet Set Playboys

Gianni Agnelli — Villa La Leopolda
Gunter Sachs — Villa La Collina
Stavros Niarchos — Spetsopoula
Dado Ruspoli — Castello Ruspoli
Aly Khan — The Château de l'Horizon

“Have you ever worked?”, a journalist once asked Dado Ruspoli, one of the twentieth century's finest bon vivants. “No,” he replied. “I’ve never had the time.” It’s a busy job, being idle. And especially when you factor in the frankly soul-crushing commutes involved — the jet to St Tropez; the boat to Porto Cervo; the Ferrari to Gstaad. The young these days just don’t have it in them. I blame Zoom.

But on weekends like this, when the pavements of London are hot enough to fry a quail’s egg on, one almost begins to envy those billionaire gallivanters of yesteryear — not least for their ability to get away from it all. Here, then, in a delirium of heatwave-induced nostalgia, we present the five finest summer homes of the jet set playboys.

1. Gianni Agnelli — Villa La Leopolda

Villa La Leopolda, a sprawling Belle Epoque mansion in Villefranche-sur-Mer, was Agnelli’s perch of choice when down on the Riviera. L’avvocato was known for his dramatic arrivals to the area, preferring to fly-in via helicopter, jump into the sea, and swim to shore. Built in 1931 by the King of Belgium as a present for his mistress, the villa has had a suitably colourful history since. After being sold by Agnelli in the 1980s, the estate passed through various dubiously wealthy hands before a Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov tried (and failed) to buy it in the 2000s, losing a £39 million deposit in the process. Perhaps Prokhorov dodged a bullet, though. Now owned by the estate of Brazilian heiress Lily Safra, the gardens alone here are said to cost $5 million a year to upkeep.

2. Gunter Sachs — Villa La Collina

Sachs famously showered Bridget Bardot’s house in Saint Tropez with a thousand rosés in his attempt to woo her — and once he’d succeeded, he spared no expense on his own party pad nearby. Villa La Collina became the de facto headquarters of the Riviera high life in the 1960s — a place of raucous gatherings and high culture. It was in St Tropez, after all, where Opel heir Sachs first met a fledgling young artist called Andy Warhol, and his home here near Pampelonne beach housed works by Dalí, Magritte, Yves Klein, and Warhol himself. The six-bedroom villa, built in the Neo-Provencal style, is now a holiday home. You can rent it for around €10,000 a week.

3. Stavros Niarchos — Spetsopoula

Shipping tycoon Niarchos once joked that buying a private island was easier than having neighbours, and for many decades the isle of Spetsopoula was his haven of seclusion and discretion. It’s still not known how much Niarchos paid for the two-square kilometre island, which he acquired in the mid-1950s in a pique of competition with his old rival Aristotle Onassis, who had just bought Scorpios nearby. But many know it now for the tragedy that struck the paradise isle in 1970, when Niarchos’s wife Eugenia died in its central villa from a suspected overdose of barbiturates.

4. Dado Ruspoli — Castello Ruspoli

Alessandro ‘Dado’ Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri, once joked that the only use of titles was that they got one invited to better parties. The irony, of course, was that he threw some of the best — and often from the family’s renaissance pile Castello Ruspoli, just north of Rome. The place was a bolthole of various Popes over the centuries, but the later gatherings there were often less than holy: Mick Jagger, Bridget Bardot, and Salvador Dalí often partied in the palace till sunrise. Ruspoli — a man of great style who wrote a little poetry and acted in a few films — was used to fast-living, having once been arrested with 5lb of opium in his Maserati. Saved from addiction by the painter Jean Cocteau, he spent much of his latter days tending to the vast acreage of the Castello, which still boasts arguably the finest Italian Renaissance garden in existence.

5. Aly Khan — The Château de l'Horizon

The actress Maxine Elliot commissioned the Château de l'Horizon to be built in 1938 on the recommendation of novelist Somerset Maugham — he who famously coined the epithet of the Riviera as a “sunny place for shady people”. L’Horizon, fittingly, had its fair share of both, filled with a shifting cast of elegant waifs, movie stars, and industrialists from the moment Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth moved there in 1948. (A photo from the time shows a rotund Winston Churchill bombing it down a water slide at the chateau.) The following year, the couple held their wedding at the Golfe-Juan estate, where a hundred security guards and a boat patrol were hired to ward off the press and the swimming pool was filled with cologne. The guests worked their way through an alleged fifty pounds of caviar on the night, about which Aly’s father, the Aga Khan, grumbled: “Too much caviar, Rita; too much caviar”.

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