Inside the $4 Million Apartment That Was Once Henri Matisse’s Nice Studio
The 1,720 square-foot space inside a 13th-century Italianate palace overlooks both the Mediterranean Sea and Old Town
Glimpsed from a café along Nice’s Old Town market on the Cours Saleya—a long rectangle of stalls piled high with fruit, vegetables, and flowers—the Palais Caïs de Pierlas rises at the far end of the square. At certain hours of the day, its golden-yellow façade takes on an uncanny glow against a cobalt sky.
It was precisely this view that captivated the apartment’s current owner more than 50 years ago, when she and her husband sat nearby over an apéritif and found themselves gazing up at the building’s upper floors. One day, she thought, she would love to live there.
Half a century later, that improbable wish became reality. When the long-neglected apartment finally came up for auction, nearly 40 bidders competed for the 1,720 square-foot space overlooking the sea and sky. She persisted, acquiring the apartment for just under $4 million.
But the apartment’s current owner was not the first to succumb to the seduction of this 13th-century Italianate palace. A century earlier, Henri Matisse recognized its magic at once.
When the artist arrived in Nice in 1917, he quickly fell under the spell of what he later called the Mediterranean’s “rich silvery clarity.” In 1921, he rented an apartment here in the Palais Caïs de Pierlas, eventually combining the third and fourth floors, with the atelier occupying the top floor. For the next 17 years, Matisse assembled elaborate interiors for his models—low divans, richly colored, patterned textiles, and folding screens—staging the interiors, still lifes, and odalisques of his Niçoise years within this dazzling light-filled atelier.
Today the apartment looks very different. The theatrical décor of Matisse’s studio has given way to white walls and quiet modern lines following a massive renovation by Gérard and Guilherme of Studio Cameleon Design, which stripped away worn Provençal ceramic tiles and a faux-marble plaster chimney.
The owner later acquired the attic above, allowing the architects to create additional guest rooms—an intervention that proved technically demanding. “The biggest challenge was the roof,” Gérard explains. “We had to install beams measuring 7.6 meters in the attic.” Even smaller decisions were carefully considered: the blue-grey kitchen was relocated to a narrow corridor, creating a streamlined cooking space.
In the spacious open living and dining room, where Matisse once worked at his easel, French doors open onto a wraparound balcony overlooking the palm-lined Promenade des Anglais and the glittering Mediterranean beyond.
When the doors are closed, the apartment falls almost completely silent, the sea appearing as a luminous square of blue framed by the windows. Turn the other way and the view opens across red-tiled roofs of the Old Town—ocher façades, laundry hanging from balconies and window cords like bright flags in the wind—and just below, the small dome of the Chapelle de la Très-Sainte-Trinité.
The owner says she loves to sit at the dining table facing the sun—the same luminous perspective that appears again and again in Matisse’s paintings. As the artist once wrote, “When I realized that every morning I would see this light again, I could hardly believe my happiness.”