On the French Rivierea there’s a villa one hilltop over from Éze that has always blown my mind. In a place where everyone else’s houses and villas are built cheek-to-jowl, the Château Balsan sits on its own 70 hectare (172 acre) hill that drops to the sea (or to the railroad track, at least). It was built in 1920 by Consuelo Vanderbilt and her French second husband Jacques Balsan (thus the name, though they called it Lou Seuil), in collaboration with the landscape architect of Blenheim Palace (she’d been traded to the Duke of Marlborough by her mother).
In all the years I’d known about the house, I’d known about the Vanderbilt connection, but not anything of its current/latest owner. Until yesterday. Vanderbilt died in 1964, and by 1969, it was owned by France’s leading mall developer, Robert Zellinger [de] Balkany. That’s when married his second wife there, Princesse Marie-Gabrielle de Savoie, the daughter of the last king of Italy. Judith Benhamou reports that it was around this time he added the “de” to his name, and insisted on being addressed as Barone, though I don’t think that’s how defunct Italian titles work.
Anyway, he filled Château Balsan and his multiple other houses with extravagant furniture and objets, long after he and the Princesse divorced in 1990. This buck wild vermeil candelabrum, for example, he bought at Christie’s in 2004.
It was made for the Duke of York, King George III’s second son, in 1824, and depicts Hercules slaying the Hydra; each of its nine heads holds a candle. It stands 35 inches high, and is made from 35 kg of silver. It’s a baroque pastiche composition by Edward Farrell, the master silversmith at Kensington Lewis, who fed the Duke’s massive silver habit. Relatedly, it was first sold after the Duke’s death in 1827, along with all his silver, to settle his massive debts. Most of the stuff, though, including this candelabrum, ended up selling for less than a quarter of what it originally cost, which, combined with the death of his main client, kind of crashed Kensington Lewis’s retail business.
Anyway, ZdeB must have bought it after it failed to sell in 2004, because it is not listed. He died in 2015, and the candelabrum was the top lot in a 2017 700-lot sale of stuff from Paris and Éze, the fourth time it came up for sale at Christie’s. Not a lot of bangers; only 20 lots sold for more than GBP 100,000, but he made it up in volume, I guess.
It seems like the house remains in the family, though if it sold, it’d probably be the most expensive house in the world, and would sell to someone far worse than a mall developer.