Maureen Emerson

In 1925 Barry Dierks, a young American architect, and his partner, an ex-Colonel in the British Army, built their dream home on windswept peninsula in the French Riviera. A modernist masterpiece, it captivated Riviera society from the moment it was built and established Dierks’ reputation as the most in-demand architect on the Cote d’Azur – as well as one of its most adored socialites. Over the course of 40 years, Dierks designed and built more than 70 of the Riviera’s most celebrated houses: from Somerset Maugham’s Villa Mauresque and Jack Warner’s Villa Aujourd’hui to the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s Villa Le Roc and Maxine Elliott’s Château de l’Horizon, later the home of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan. Riviera Dreaming tells the dazzling story of the lives, loves and adventures that played out behind the walls of these glamorous houses and provides and unparalleled portrait of life on the Cote d’Azur at the height of the Jazz Age.