People

inside Coco Chanel’s sun-kissed sanctum for art’s superstars

The French fashion designer’s lavish Mediterranean villa was frequented by everyone from Dalí to Garbo to Stravinsky to Churchill. It has now been lovingly restored – with a thrillingly bolstered library

It is the place where Salvador Dalí painted The Enigma of Hitler, a haunting landscape featuring a giant telephone receiver that seems to be crying a tear over a cutout picture of the Fuhrer. Conceived in 1939, the work seems to anticipate war. It is also the place where Winston Churchill penned parts of his multi-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and painted its dappled-light view. Somerset Maugham would visit, too, as well as novelist Colette, composer Igor Stravinsky and playwright Jean Cocteau, partaking in lunches that lasted all day and night, with debates and discussions around artistic ideas.

This place is La Pausa: the Mediterranean villa in the hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, once owned by husband-and-wife writing duo Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson, followed by French fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who had it rebuilt from scratch at the end of the 1920s. She later sold it to an American publishing couple, Emery and Wendy Reves.

Sprawling yet monastic, the white-walled house – with blue shutters and black crittall windows clustered in groups of five in homage to Chanel’s No 5 – has just been restored to its original specification, after being bought back by the luxury fashion brand in 2015. Architect Peter Marino studied countless photographs to get it right: from the concrete squares that sit in a quilt-like grid atop the lawn, to the potted cacti at the foot of the staircase. Original bedframes were bought, too, as well as the installation of an entirely mirrored bathroom, not unlike the one at 31 Rue Cambon, Coco’s address in Paris.

Revived … La Pausa, the Mediterranean villa in the hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in 2025. Photograph: Jason Schmidt/Chanel

But when you’re restoring a place with such a rich past, how do you capture its spirit and honour its history, bringing to life the words and minds of its illustrious guests to create the most multi-layered portrait of all? Simple. You build a library.

Bookshelves are, after all, a record of the knowledge, characters and ideas that have swirled around someone’s mind, reflecting their interests, desires, and – often in the case of artists or writers – their friends. Whenever I go to an artist’s studio, or visit someone’s house, I am always intrigued about what lives on their shelves – especially if the writers are no longer alive. It’s an intimate way to get to know someone. It deepens our understanding of them, gives us access to their interior worlds, takes us to places we didn’t know they’d been to.

I remember visiting Alice Neel’s Manhattan apartment and seeing her many books on topics that ranged from socialism to psychoanalysis. And Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City home was filled with texts on Buddhism, magic, Celtic history, as well as books on loneliness.

‘We believe the future is made with fragments of the past’ … La Pausa’s library after Peter Marino’s restoration. Photograph: Jason Schmidt/Chanel

But what if someone’s library could continue to grow after they had gone? Had the residents of La Pausa lived on, what books would they continue to read, and how might we perceive them in the present day?

This was the challenge set by Chanel during the restoration, aided by the specialist booksellers at Hatchards in London (where Coco’s lover, the Duke of Westminster, had an account) and 7L in Paris. Given a list of 100 books that Chanel was known to have cherished and read, the team set about choosing titles in line with her scholarship. But they also wanted to create a broader portrait of her friends and interests, and who and what passed through La Pausa. “And what has happened since, across music, architecture and fiction,” says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel.

Entering the wood-panelled library was like stepping into the minds and worlds of those who stood there before me. Adorning the shelves were biographies of Picasso by John Richardson, rare editions of Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, dust jackets designed by Vanessa Bell for her sister Virginia Woolf’s book, The Waves; plus first editions of those who frequented the French Riviera, such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. There were also books by (or about) guests who visited the villa, from Somerset Maugham to Greta Garbo, as well as glimpses into their private worlds, with the bounded volumes of Jean Cocteau’s letters.

Glimpses into private worlds … the La Pausa library. Photograph: Roger Schall © Schall Collection

“We believe the future is made with fragments of the past,” says Peel, which is why the library is also brought up to date with works by Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk. To make it even more contemporary, says Peel, “as our guests come to visit, they will leave their own books”.

Standing back and admiring the library as a whole, you sense a sprawling web of artists who worked, conversed, inspired and consumed each other’s works – directly and indirectly – across centuries. And at its centre was a woman who shaped, and is still shaping, culture today. But why would a library be important to her?

Books were the very medium Coco harnessed to escape from her hard and humble beginnings. Aged 11, she was left parentless after her mother died of tuberculosis and her father abandoned his daughters at an orphanage run by Cistercian nuns at the abbey of Aubazine. Never with much money, she found canny ways to access books: “I read everything … We never bought books at home; we cut out the serial from the newspaper and we sewed together long sheets of yellow paper. That’s what little Coco lapped up in secret … I copied down whole passages from novels … [they] taught me about life.”

Salvador Dalí at La Pausa in the 1930s. Photograph: Photo Wolfgang Vennemann. © Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí/ADAGP, Paris 2025

Books were a place of refuge, a conduit for Coco to dream about being the heroine in her own fabulous tale and imagine countless other lives for herself. One has to remember how difficult it would have been for her as a woman to build an empire from scratch, decades before women even got the vote in France. It would have required huge amounts of imagination and storytelling. As she said: “Books have been my best friends.”

So when it came to restoring La Pausa, the library was to be its beating heart and pensive mind, the place that held everything together. In many ways, aren’t all of our bookshelves? They reflect back to us what we’ve done, learned, and have stored inside of us; who we’ve met (sometimes literally as well as imaginatively) and how we’ve escaped. As with Neel’s and Carrington’s, they reveal our curiosities, secrets and desires. Memory palaces housing our sprawling inner worlds, they can be the most intimate portraits of all. Take a look at your own bookshelves and ask: “What do they say about me?”

Story by The Guardian

People

Christopher Lane noticed a ‘sketchy’ detail early in relationship with Wade Wilson

Months before he brutally murdered two women in one day, Wade Wilson began a brief romance with a man named Christopher Lane.

“This was my first relationship with a guy,” Lane said during season 2 of Netflix’s docuseries Worst Ex Ever, which premiered in May 2026. “We enjoyed being together. We did a lot of stuff together. We had fun.”

The two men dated for over a month, during which time Lane claimed that Wilson — who would later be known as the “Deadpool Killer” because of the name he shared with the Marvel character — physically assaulted him with a knife on at least one occasion.

This act of violence, in hindsight, foreshadowed what was to come.

Five months after their relationship ended, Wilson strangled 35-year-old Kristine Melton while she slept after meeting her in a bar in Fort Myers, Fla. Hours later, he lured 43-year-old Diane Ruiz into his car and choked her while he was driving, Gulf Coast News Now reported. He then ran over her body multiple times.

Wilson was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in June 2024 and received two death sentences.

So, where is Christopher Lane now? Here’s everything to know about his relationship with Wade Wilson and his life after dating the “Deadpool Killer.”

Lane briefly dated Wilson months before his killing spree

The two men met in March 2019 while working at a carnival in Inverness, Fla. A week after being introduced, Wilson moved into Lane’s RV, and they started dating soon after.

He even asked Lane to make their relationship Facebook official, which came as a surprise, given that Wilson had been “so skeptical about being with a guy.”

“Wade said that he was straight when I met him,” Lane said on Worst Ex Ever. “But I was like ‘That seems a little sketchy.’ If you’re straight, you don’t move into a guy’s house with a guy and then want to sleep in his bed.”

He claimed that Wilson attacked him with a knife

After a night of partying and taking a substance Lane believed to be bath salts, Wilson allegedly began “flipping out” over someone breaking into the RV — then threatened to slit Lane’s throat with a knife.

What followed, Lane claimed, was a four-hour altercation in which Wilson choked and stabbed him multiple times in the chest and hand, before throwing him through a pair of sliding glass doors.

Wilson fled, only to return the next day alongside Lane’s sister, covered in blood.

“My sister calmed the situation down, and like, he showed back up with blood all over him and apologized,” Lane said on Worst Ex Ever. “He seemed sincere.”

Wilson wasn’t charged with attacking Lane

Lane didn’t report the incident to the police, and they moved to Key West a month later.

He broke up with Wilson after learning that he had been lying to people about the nature of their relationship.

At the time Worst Ex Ever was released in May 2026, no charges had been brought against Wilson in connection with Lane’s alleged assault.

Where is Christopher Lane now?

According to his Instagram page, Lane still resides in Florida and works in the carnival circuit.

Though he’s mostly kept his history with Wade private, he shared a screenshot on Instagram of his profile views increasing in August 2024 with the caption, “When people find out your the til tok killerWade Wilson’s ex boyfriend lol.”

Worst Ex Ever marked the first time Lane opened up about his relationship with the “Deadpool Killer.”

“Looking back, the night Wade stabbed me could have ended up very differently,” he said on Worst Ex Ever. “I could have been dead.”

PEOPLE

People

David Attenborough, ‘the voice for nature,’ turns 100

Britain’s David Attenborough, who has for decades been the world’s most authoritative voice on the natural world and whose documentaries have been watched by hundreds of millions, will on Friday celebrate his 100th birthday.

After more than 70 years of film-making, Attenborough’s instantly recognisable voice is synonymous with the story of ‌nature. He is still at the vanguard of efforts to protect the environment and has produced some of his most impactful work in recent years.

Counting Britain’s royal family, Barack Obama and pop star Billie Eilish among his admirers, Attenborough’s charisma, humour and warmth, alongside the depth of his knowledge and his flair for storytelling, have made him a broadcasting superstar.

“Your ability to communicate the beauty and vulnerability of our natural environment remains unequalled,” was how the late Queen Elizabeth summed up his achievements in 2019.

‘LONESOME GEORGE’ AND THE FRAGILE ENVIRONMENT

Attenborough’s films have communicated the wonder and also the tragedies of the natural world to viewers across the globe.

Standout scenes include his encounter with two playful young mountain gorillas who clambered onto him ⁠during his landmark 1979 series “Life on Earth”.

He also made his audience marvel at the teamwork of a pod of orcas hunting a seal by creating waves to break up ice, and his telling in 2012 of the story of “Lonesome George”, the last surviving Pinta Island tortoise, moved people to tears.

“He’s about 80 years old, and getting a bit creaky in his joints – as indeed am I,” Attenborough, then 86, said.

George’s death, two weeks after he was filmed, marked the extinction of his species.

“He’s focused the attention of the world on the fragility of our environment,” Attenborough said at the time.

While Attenborough has topped numerous national popularity polls, being named the country’s most admired man and the greatest living British cultural icon, friends say he rolls his eyes when he is labelled a “national treasure”.

“What he feels is that he’s a public servant. He feels that he had the unique opportunity to be the voice for nature, to tell everybody about the wonders of nature,” Mike Gunton, a television producer who has worked with Attenborough many times, told Reuters.

As climate change has accelerated and the threat to much of the world has become more urgent, Attenborough devoted much of ‌his 90s ⁠to raising public awareness.

His 2017 blockbuster “Blue Planet 2”, which highlighted the scourge of plastic in the ocean, achieved some of the highest viewing figures on British television before being sold to broadcasters around the world.

Albatrosses unwittingly feeding their chicks plastic fished from the ocean jolted public opinion and led the British government and major retailers to announce measures to reduce the use of plastics.

“I think every single person who’s seen anything that Sir David has done has been inspired to care about nature,” said Doug Gurr, director of the Natural History Museum in London.

SPECIAL BBC BROADCASTS AND EVENTS

In Britain, Attenborough’s centenary is being marked with a week of ⁠special broadcasts on the BBC, a live concert at the Royal Albert Hall, events at museums, nature walks and tree planting.

The broadcasts include his new series “Secret Garden”. At 99, he remains heavily involved in programme-making, say BBC colleagues, driven by his enduring curiosity and joy of storytelling.

“That’s typical David. He makes everything really enjoyable,” said Mike Salisbury, who has worked as a producer on several Attenborough documentaries.

Born on May 8, 1926, Attenborough spent ⁠his childhood collecting fossils, insects and dried seahorses.

His BBC career took off in 1954 when he presented “Zoo Quest”, which involved him travelling to far-flung parts of the world and bringing animals back to London Zoo.

By the 1970s he had risen to be programme controller at the broadcaster but decided he wanted to return to making nature documentaries.

Screened in 1979 when he was 52, “Life on Earth” ⁠made him a household name. He wrote the entire 13-hour script and travelled the world for three years to tell the story of evolution from simple organisms to humans.

Dozens of documentaries followed, including “Blue Planet,” “Frozen Planet” and “Dynasties”. As the decades passed, his sense of the need to act only increased.

“How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world and did nothing?” Attenborough said.

Reuters

People

Meryl Streep revives iconic cerulean sweater

Miranda Priestly would have something to say about Meryl Streep’s latest look.

With a nod to one of the most iconic moments in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Streep appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” wearing a cerulean blue cable-knit sweater.

The J.Crew cashmere style is a custom version of one that the brand currently sells for $198, created with Streep’s stylist Micaela Erlanger.

J.Crew designer Olympia Gayot said in a press release, “Meryl made cerulean a cultural thesis, so the bar was high. That monologue is so smart and funny — it reminds you that what feels personal is actually part of a much bigger story, which is why ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ still resonates.”

“At J.Crew, we’ve been obsessed with color since 1983, so stepping into cerulean — the cerulean — with Micaela was equal parts honor and wink,” she added.

When asked about the look, Streep casually tells Colbert that it’s “Annie Hathaway’s,” referring to her co-star, who wore a similar style in one of the first meetings of their on-screen characters, with the host then repeating a line from the original 2006 movie.

Speaking about the “lumpy blue sweater” Hathaway wears in the original, Streep as Priestley says, “what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.”

After describing the trickle-down of the trend from 2002 Oscar de la Renta in to “some tragic casual corner where [she], no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin,” she delivers one of the most-repeated lines from the film.

“That blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room … from a pile of ‘stuff.’”

The press tour for “The Devil Wears Prada 2” has only just begun and this is already the second nod to the color that is burned in everyone’s brains.

On Sunday, Ashley Afriyie, who has been working with Hathaway and Streep’s styling teams, also shared a photo on Instagram of the former wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a Pantone chip of the bright blue cerulean hue. It said “ ceruleo,” the Italian word for cerulean.

In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Streep shared, “The first movie was such an unknown quantity,” adding, “that fashion brands were initially hesitant to get on board and lend clothes.”

The sequel is clearly free of any similar issues.

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