Although fashion designer and style icon Jacqueline de Ribes loved the light at Les Hauts de Saint Marc, her Provençal house sitting high above the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, she rarely saw the morning there. Preferring to linger long past noon in her 18th-century mahogany Portuguese bed, nibbling dry toast and sipping tea in a negligee, she would emerge around teatime or just before dinner.
Holding court in caftans cinched with a jeweled belt, sometimes slit to the hip well into her 70s, she always arrived last and was unquestionably the most glamorous person in the room. Even 50 years into their marriage, her granddaughter Alix de La Rochefoucauld recalls that her grandfather, Count Edouard de Ribes, still watched his wife arrive “with stars in his eyes.”
The house originally belonged to Jacqueline’s mother, Paule de Beaumont, heiress to the Rivaud rubber and latex fortune and a formidable intellectual in her own right who translated the plays of Tennessee Williams into French. Paule’s husband, Jean, came from an old aristocratic family—one ancestor managed to serve as a general under the French Revolution, Napoleon, and Louis XVIII. Dividing their time between Paris, Corsica, and Provence, the Beaumonts decorated all their houses in the same simple, rustic register. As free-spirited ’60s bohemians, they always embraced the new—and, Alix says, “loved being naked all the time.”
Jacqueline, the eldest of three, was sent to boarding school—always a rule-breaker, she never finished her Baccalauréat—and at 18, she fell in love with Count Edouard de Ribes (then 25 and engaged to someone else) at a tennis tournament, and they married a year later. Jacqueline developed her eye for style over time. In 1955, she began working with society couturier Oleg Cassini, and employed an unknown young man named Valentino Garavani. Discovered by the great French couturiers in her late 20s, she became a muse to Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, and Guy Laroche, absorbing their knowledge before launching her own couture collection in 1982.
Jacqueline inherited Les Hauts de Saint Marc on her mother’s death in 2000 and kept much of the original design: a pink bathroom with local tiles and ’60s sconces, heated towel racks that felt very modern for their time. A lover of Ibiza white and simple beige, Jacqueline slowly layered her own clean aesthetic over her parents’ pop-art taste. “It’s this kind of simple, chic thing,” Alix explains. “That’s the whole idea about this house—being in a place where it’s refined without being bling-bling, with local material and very good taste.”
Philippe Tallien—later immortalized by photographer Slim Aarons in front of his Bastide Grande villa in 1977—built the house in 1963, and it was decorated by Claude Chauvin, updating a pre-existing structure to the family’s needs. Jacqueline’s perfectionism extended from her appearance to the care of her guests: visitors were greeted with the house drink, lemon juice with strawberry syrup over ice, and shown to their rooms by maids in starched blue-and-white uniforms.
The interiors, most with private terraces, mixed family furniture and portraits with the occasional Picasso print or local pieces. Windows with green shutters are framed by huge sprays of purple bougainvillea climbing the walls. Curved wrought-iron furniture, typical of the region, runs throughout, from the chaise longue on the terrace to the torches flanking the white dining room, where a de Beaumont military ancestor keeps a watchful gaze.
After long lunches, guests would change into casual clothes, dip in the pool, play a round of pétanque, or sit and admire the view, anchored by a rare, ancient parasol pine typical of the South of France. They could gaze at distant vineyards, fields of lavender and scarlet thyme, and breathe in the heady, herbal scent so evocative of the South of France in summer. They might drive the 15 minutes to the local beach at Beauvallon for a swim, or head into Saint-Tropez, another 15 minutes on, for a night out. For culture, there was the Chartreuse de la Verne, the monastery founded in 1170, or the hilltop villages of Gassin, Ramatuelle, and Grimaud, with their local markets.
Cocktails might be a glass of house rosé (La Tour de l’Horloge of Les Vignerons de Grimaud)—though Jacqueline herself preferred a White Lady, with French lemon juice. Dinner was always a different kind of fresh fish, perhaps a carpaccio with a soup or salad course, followed by Edouard’s favorite dessert: a crown-shaped bavarois, made with yogurt and topped with fresh fruit and wild strawberries. Regional dishes like canard aux pêches (duck with peaches) were served hot at lunch, followed by salad and cheese with wine. In colder months, friends and family retreated to the cozier rooms and the fireplace, where a Blue Edition Eilersen table from 1970 is flanked by early ’70s Mario Bellini poufs.
After dinner, guests gathered on the terrace or in the cozy pool house, which had a harmonious mixture of ochre and terracotta colors. The lights were set as close to the wall as possible, so they’d blend in. Jacqueline held firmly to the idea that “a lady mustn’t have lights that are too strong,” Alix notes. “My children loved going for midnight swims there as the lighting in the evening is lovely.”
The de Ribeses counted the era’s leading tastemakers among their close friends: Gianni and Marella Agnelli, Jack Nicholson, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, Gunter Sachs, the Cuevas ballet family, and Carlos de Beistegui, host of the legendary Bal Oriental. Many would come for extended visits at Les Hauts de Saint Marc, and Jacqueline would preside like Sherezade over all these rapt guests. “She would tell stories in such an incredible way,” Alix recalls. “You’d be hung on her every word. She loved an emotional, psychological take on people.”
But there was a gentler side to Jacqueline the public rarely saw, and it would emerge most visibly here: that of a doting grandmother. She invented stories for her grandchildren, one about two drops of water, Perla and Goutelette, who traveled the world through drains and pipes, out to sea, up into clouds and down again over new countries, having adventures everywhere. “She was very creative,” Alix notes.
Nowhere did that creativity show more than in her own designs. Emmanuel Ungaro was such a close friend and collaborator that he lent her his studio so she could hand-design Alix’s wedding dress; a whole summer’s work, it was cut on the bias for transparency (though she vetoed the gold trim Alix wanted) and featured medieval-style sleeves. “She was dreaming of living long enough to design a dress for Isabeau [Alix’s daughter], but obviously, Isabeau’s only 13,” Alix says. She’d also wanted to record a video of marriage advice for her great-granddaughter, “but never got the strength to do it.”
Jacqueline’s legacy as a style icon looms large: Richard Avedon famously photographed her profile as a sphinx, an image later transposed onto the Empire State Building for Harper’s Bazaar’s 150th anniversary in 2017, and a copy of the work now hangs in the home alongside ancestral portraits from her Beaumont forebears. In 2010, she was awarded Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur at the Élysée Palace for her work with the arts.
And her vision for her homes was just as exacting: on one of her husband’s last Christmases in Gstaad, she found the exact tree she wanted in a shop window, bought the whole display, and had the staff rehang every ornament in the identical arrangement at their chalet. Even in her later years, when infirmity kept her from the parties themselves, she still worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure perfection. “She was meant to be sponsoring the dinner of the Friends of the Museum at the Musée d’Orsay this year, but the PR she was doing it with had a heart attack, so my grandmother did it all behind the scenes,” Alix says. “She didn’t like the tablecloth’s color, so she turned it over—too shiny, not refined enough. She chose the flowers, the cutlery, the place cards. In the end, she wasn’t even there.”
When Jacqueline died in late 2025, the fashion world poured out tributes, both online and in the form of flowers: the Arnault family sent the family a wall of white blooms, while the Musée d'Orsay and the Vignerons de Grimaud sent bunches of their own. She was venerated and admired by many. To her family, though, she was someone else—the private woman, the grandmother, the storyteller. In her final years, she used to say to Alix of the house and her memories there: “I can tell you all this because you understand where I come from.”