Yours For $70 Million: Villa Alang Alang, The Most Expensive Property For Sale On The French Riviera

In the stratosphere of global real estate north of $30 million, or multiples of that, the Cannes and Cote d’Azur markets are ticklishly fickle in that, after a purchase, even the savviest buyers can wind up with surprisingly little for a whole lot. Put another way, at eight-figure heights in such exalted locations, true value is sometimes difficult to discern. But in the extraordinary case of Villa Alang Alang, with its commanding cliff-hanging site in Cannes’ “La Californie” enclave, the nine-bedroom mansion and its 3.25-acre grounds forthrightly announce why, at $69.3 million, the estate is the most expensive property currently offered on the French Riviera.

It’s not a surprise, then, that Sting gave a private, impromptu performance for a select group of music-industry invitees at Live Nation’s annual Cannes Lions wrap party at Alang Alang last week. In short, there’s no fire sale here, which is a way of saying that even the most sharp-fanged buyer will be unlikely to tear this asking price down by much. The place is fully booked during the Cannes Film Festival and all the other conventions during the year.   In the summer, much like a desired superyacht, it’s booked by families.

Until it sells, Alang Alang’s very agile developer/owner, who built the villa and whose labors of love have expanded and groomed it for the last decade-and-a-half, is quite happy to rent it out. In the summer season, then, if you’re looking for a fully-staffed nine-bedroom with a 25-meter pool and a private beach along a water feature in its garden, Alang Alang can be yours for $415,000 per month.

Some history is in order to explain how the gargantuan 17,200-square-foot property got put together. La Californie Pezou, as the district is formally known, lies just east and north of the center of Cannes, on the relatively gentle gradient sweeping from the oceanfront to the hills above town. Cannes became the Palm Beach of France in the mid-19th century, and the leafy spaciousness of La Californie drew, among others, Eugene Tripet, a former French consul in Moscow, who built a mansion there for his Russian wife in 1848. Their son, Viscomte Fenelon, built a second not far from his father’s, which house Picasso, then with Jacqueline, bought from the family in 1955.  The Picasso villa was re-dubbed La Californie, after the neighborhood, which, itself, originally took the name from a local resort hotel.  Picasso’s granddaughter Marina sold the grand old whitewashed stone La Californie in 2015 for the benefit of her charities.  Point is, La Californie, the district, has been the trading floor for spectacular real estate for a century-and-a-half.

Fast forward to the millennium:  Legendary global party boy and disgraced arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi has fallen on hard times and is unloading properties.  He decides to sell a three-acre place in La Californie — there’s a house on it, but nothing special.  It’s snapped up by the current owner, an enterprising British developer who recognizes that the value is in the land, promptly knocks the house down, and, over the following fourteen years, replaces it with the sweeping Balinese-inspired palace that we know today.  The architect of record is Gilles Pellerin of Collection Prive.

The attention to detail by the owner and the architect has been close.  From the louvered window shades in the bedrooms to the cabanas cut into the stone of the hillside, to the scrollwork pattern of the tiling on the bottom of the full-sized 25-meter pool matching that of its fence, Alang Alang has been engineered for delight.  There’s a gym, a spa, and, since last year, a “beach” in the form of stone-walled sand area built next to a huge waterfall and small secondary pool at end of the garden.

“The beach is incredibly popular with kids,” says Knight Frank’s Riviera CEO Fredrik Lilloe, “and as far as we know Alang Alang is the only property on the Riviera with this kind of feature. There’s just less reason to leave the place, and in fact we’re seeing guests cancelling loads of things in order to just stay at the property and enjoy, relax, work out at the massive gym and visit the spa, things like that.”

Named for the long, ubiquitous tropical Southeast Asian grass species imperata cylindrica, or satintail, the house could as easily be called Bali-sur-Mer. For its greatest sales factor is that, outside the gates will, still, be the Cote d’Azur. Seen this way, the Villa Alang Alang’s sale seems a not a question of if, but when. In the meantime, for those hardy souls with the hot summer cash burning in their pockets, a month spent in this house’s grand embrace could just be the tonic.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.