Chris Parker remodels a garden that starred in a Hitchcock classic

Times

09-05-2025

The century-old Château de la Croix des Gardes, perched high in the hills overlooking the Bay of Cannes, is perhaps best known for being a backdrop in Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 film To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But it was the 11 hectares of gardens, ponds, pools and woodlands, rather than the Palladian-style villa, that caught the attention of the British billionaire Chris Parker when he first saw it eight years ago.
'The real estate agent dropped me off and I said, 'Look, if you don't mind, could you just pick me up in four hours and just leave me here alone?'' Parker, the online gaming and film production entrepreneur, recalls. 'I could see the architecture was splendid. But for me it was all about the gardens.' As he wandered around he could immediately envisage spending hours here, he says, looking at the garden and the blue of the Mediterranean, the Lérins Islands (where the Man in the Iron Mask was held captive) and the Esterel Mountains.
The garden had been modified several times since the château was built for the Swiss industrialist Paul Girod in 1919 (the Palladian-style façade was commissioned by another former owner, the Perrier boss Gustave Leven, in the 1960s). Working with the Grasse-based landscape architect François Navarro, Parker's ambition was to return the garden of Château de la Croix des Gardes to its original glory 'with as many plants and materials from the south of France'.
It proved a huge task, given that 'it had been abandoned and the plants were not good, so everything needed to be totally remade,' says Navarro, whose practice creates gardens and parks across the Côte d'Azur and Provence. The parkland was regenerated with dozens of trees, including acers, citrus and figs, among existing and new pines; beds were filled with peonies, camellias, gardenias and irises (the blue iris adorns the château's coat of arms); the 36-metre infinity pool was restored; and a terrace was planted with hardy succulents.
Paths were also created to wind through vegetable and cottage gardens, avenues of wisteria and valleys of magnificent magnolia trees.
'I liked the idea that everywhere you go there is a new surprise,' Parker says. Romance fills the air too from March to December, thanks to Navarro's planting of fragrant, frilly-petalled heirloom roses in soft shades, jasmine, lilies and narcissi. 'Where there is perfume, everything is better,' Navarro says.
Navarro's preference for wild styles of planting did, the owner admits, go against his military training and desire for uniformity. 'But this is not a parade,' Parker says. 'So I agreed: let's have nature growing and taking over.' Hence the vibrant mix of plants — tulips, delicate hellebores, Chinese witch hazel and silvery euphorbia among the formal topiary and conical cypresses — and the sounds of water trickling from waterlily ponds and the rockery waterfall, flower beds abuzz with bees and flocks of parakeets in the evening sky. 'There are probably a hundred flying around and it's truly amazing. Noisy, but in a beautiful way,' Parker says.
To protect the local fauna — bees, birds and butterflies — no pesticides are used and the estate's 17 gardeners are constantly assessing the practicality of plant species in the ever drier conditions. 'We've had two very, very dry years and we've lost lots of plants, so we're always trying to modify and adapt what we plant to maintain the quality of the park,' Navarro says.
After an extensive five-year restoration — Parker's 'midlife crisis to find myself a château to repair' — the place has been transformed into an immersive escape that thrills all the senses. And just as the villa once hosted Brigitte Bardot and Leslie Caron during the early years of the Cannes Film Festival, nowadays the château and its gardens also set the scene for fashion shows (Donatella Versace and Dua Lipa debuted their collaborative La Vacanza collection here in 2023) and star-studded dinners (Julianne Moore, Marion Cotillard and Lupita Nyong'o were among guests at Chopard's Secret Night Party some years ago).
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While the estate is also open for exclusive use — 'I like the idea of people enjoying this beautiful garden until I find myself retired on a rocking chair on the porch,' Parker says with a laugh — the château is very much his home. 'It's my space to potter around and unload whatever things I have in my head. I can't do that anywhere else in the world. I have a house in Los Angeles, I have a house in Hong Kong, but neither gives me the tranquil feeling that I have here.'
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