📍Villa Les Rhumbs, 1 Rue d'Estouteville, 50400 Granville, France
1905 – 1925“My parents bought Les Rhumbs in 1906, when I was a baby — a Belle Époque villa perched on a cliff top at Granville, on the Normandy coast, named after the old sailors' term for the thirty-two points of the compass. I described it later as roughcast in the softest of pinks, mixed with grey gravel, and those two colours remained my favourite hues in couture. My mother, Madeleine, turned the windswept clifftop into an English garden full of her favourite roses and lily of the valley, sheltered by a pergola and pines from the sea wind. I helped her, poring over seed catalogues and learning the names of every plant, and I dressed my sisters and myself in costumes for carnival. All my life I designed women as flowers. My family lost its fortune in the Depression, and I had to sell the house; I worked in a gallery and as an illustrator before I opened my own couture house in Paris. In 1947 my New Look was born. Les Rhumbs is now the Musée Christian Dior, and my mother's garden is one of France's few surviving early twentieth-century artists' gardens.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today