The Résidence de la Côte

The Family's Coastal Home · Portarène

The Résidence de la Côte was not designed. It accumulated. It began in 1798 as a modest summer retreat on the headland above Portarène harbour, and across two centuries each generation added to it — a wing here, a loggia there, a third floor raised in the 1880s by a prince who wanted the view, a kitchen extension in 1923 that is frankly too large for any sane household and is, for exactly that reason, one of the most beloved rooms in the building. The result is a palace with the one quality designed buildings almost never have: personality. A corridor turns where you do not expect it to. A room is inexplicably sunnier than the rooms around it. A back staircase, three steps shorter than the main one, is the one everybody actually uses.

If the Palais d'Aldric in the capital is where the family governs, the Résidence is where the family lives. It is white limestone and wrought iron and terracotta roofs, spilling down a headland to the sea, and it is the most-photographed building in Sorvaine and the only one the Aldrics actually think of as home.

A House That Grew

Everything about the Résidence is warmer and more open than the cold grandeur of the Palais. Where the capital's palace is stone and shadow and four defensive centuries, the Résidence is light and arches and terracotta — ceilings that let the air move, doorways that open onto gardens, floors that shift from tile to pale stone and back as one era's addition gives way to another's. It is grand, unquestionably; it is the coastal seat of a sovereign house. But it wears its grandeur loosely, the way a family home does, because that is what it has always actually been.

The building's whole character is in its accumulation. Two centuries of Aldrics have left their marks on it and none have erased their predecessors', so the house holds all of them at once: the 1798 hardware on the main door, still carefully maintained; the fourth step of the main staircase that has creaked since 1974 and that everyone who lives here knows to step over; the family photographs along the ground-floor corridor, four generations deep, framed inconsistently and hung by accumulation rather than any decorator's plan. It is a house that remembers everyone who has lived in it.

The Rooms That Matter

The Résidence's heart is not its grandest room but its most-used one: the kitchen, on the service level, absurdly oversized thanks to that 1923 extension, with its original iron range and a central island the size of a small boat. Everything that matters in the building passes through it eventually. Above it, the house arranges itself around light and view — the formal dining room at the west end with the best ground-floor view in the house, the harbour and old town and sea laid out through its windows; the family sitting room at the east end with its mismatched generations of furniture and the television only Felix watches; the reception salon whose doors stand open to the terrace all summer.

Higher up, the house grows more private. The second floor holds the family's rooms — the sovereign's apartments at the west end, the suites the brothers return to when they are home, Céline's room at the sunny east corner. And at the very top, reachable only by the back staircase, is the library — south and west facing, the best light and the best view in the entire building, the whole harbour of Portarène visible from its west window. It is the sort of room you have to mean to reach. No one arrives there by accident, which is exactly why it is the quietest and most private room in the house.

The Garden and the Sea

The Résidence's finest wing is not indoors at all. From the ground floor's south face the garden descends the headland in three terraces, each with its own character, linked by low limestone walls and iron gates.

The upper terrace is the formal one — clipped hedges, a central path, the jasmine climbing the south wall in June and July, the terrace where the photographs are taken. The middle terrace is the family's own — not formal, not photographed, not visible from the state rooms: a table that seats eight, chairs that have been out here for generations, a lemon tree in a terracotta pot that has stood in the same spot since 1987 and is carried indoors each winter. This is where the family actually eats when the weather allows, where Céline reads in the afternoon, where the coffee is taken before the working day. The lower terrace is wilder — orange trees, a fig tree Nicolas planted as a boy — and at its foot, a gate opens onto a path of eight stone steps cut into the headland, descending to the family's private beach: small, crescent-shaped, walled off by the headland to either side so that it is invisible from the harbour. It is the one piece of the Sorvainese coast that belongs to the family alone, and the place any of them goes when what they need is the sea and no one watching.

Home

For all its size and its cameras and its status as the most-photographed building in the principality, the Résidence's real meaning is simple: it is where the princes grew up, where the summers were spent, where the family is least on display and most itself. The Palais is where the Aldrics are the sovereign house of Sorvaine. The Résidence is where they are a family — and in the complicated geography of five royal childhoods, it is the closest thing any of them has to home.