In Monaco, Humbert & Poyet Cultivate an Astounding Villa Punctuated with Site-Specific Artworks
This five-bedroom manse feels refreshingly livable while still dazzling with extraordinary seaside views and major works by Jean-Michel Othoniel and Fernando Botero
The design duo Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet have built their reputations on interiors that feel at once elevated and deeply livable—spaces where art, craft, and a strong sense of place converge. The latest project from their Monaco-based studio, Humbert & Poyet, a five-bedroom villa perched near Larvotto Bay with expansive views toward Cap Martin, is one of their most ambitious statements yet.
Humbert and Poyet’s clients came to them first for a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. Pleased with the results, the family—art collectors with grown children—returned for something entirely different: a new villa in Mareterra, Monaco’s groundbreaking waterfront development that includes more than a hundred residences alongside cultural and recreational facilities. The designers were brought in at the project’s inception, in 2022, giving them rare control over every detail.
The home, completed last year, unfolds across six levels. A lower floor is devoted almost entirely to wellness—with a gym, a sauna, a massage room, and a cryotherapy suite. The centerpiece is a 49-foot-long indoor pool lined in limestone. Above it, a ceiling in embossed stainless steel reflects light, transforming the mood depending on the hour of the day. “It makes the water shimmer,” Humbert explains. “It is poetic and magic at night.”
The spa-like facilities, including a second pool that sits outdoors, rival those of a palace hotel in sheer scale and splendor. For the designers, this represented genuinely new territory, a wellness brief far beyond anything they had tackled before, and they embraced it fully.
The living areas on the floors above are generous in their proportions. The biggest of all is the living room, with a double-height ceiling that called for something equally grand. To that end, the clients commissioned a site-specific work from French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel—a monumental hanging version of his signature Murano glass pearls, which he describes as anoeud infini, or infinite knot. The designers worked closely with Othoniel’s studio to site the sculpture precisely within its environment, ensuring it reads from many vantage points in the home. “There is an energy and dialogue with the sun and light, which I found so interesting,” Othoniel says of the room.
The rest of the family’s collection was installed with equal intentionality—wall space and sight lines were strategically considered in the placement of works, so that art and architecture feel inseparable. In the living room, the crimson jolt of an oil-and-wax panel by José María Sicilia pairs sharply with the magenta and reds of the Othoniel sculpture hanging in front of it. A canvas by Secundino Hernández is perfectly framed by the dining room’s travertine moldings, while in the main entrance hall, a Fernando Botero sculpture seems to gesture from atop its stone pedestal to the neon hues of a Peter Halley painting nearby.
Although Humbert and Poyet often include vintage finds in their projects, this one has only a few, including a pair of chairs by Oscar Niemeyer. But most of the furnishings were designed specifically for the villa—from the curved velvet sofas in the living room and the Tai Ping rug on the second-floor landing to the elongated brass-and-opaline chandelier over the dining table. No surface was overlooked: On the top floor, a home office’s upper walls were clad in fluted walnut and baths were sheathed in highly figured marble. Downstairs, an Art Deco–inspired staircase was artfully rendered in plaster with a bronze railing. The challenge, as with any house of this scale, was warmth. Large volumes can easily turn cold and impersonal, and the assignment was clear: The environment had to feel both impactful and genuinely livable for a multigenerational family. It does.
That balance—between grandeur and ease, between a serious art collection and a home where a family can feel comfortable—is precisely what the designers do best. Their signature is a blend of French savoir-faire and an almost pragmatic attentiveness to how people really live. They begin by listening to their clients and reading the location, then amplifying what was already there: in this case, the light, the water, the view. Here, with Monaco’s bay glittering below and Othoniel’s pearls catching the sun inside, they’ve done exactly that.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Fall Issue under the headline “Grand Prix.” Subscribe to the magazine.