That Rivieria Touch!

Ooh la la!

The Riviera door is a classic in its own right. It has six panels of glass to allow the light to pass from one room to the next. It’s enough to brighten a dark adjacent room but glazed to maintain some privacy. It has a sunken edge that leads to a raised centre panel just below the glass panelling that gives the touch and style of a door far more expensive that what it retails for. So why is this popular door called ‘The Riviera’? What is the history behind the ‘Riviera style’ that's brushed off on to one of the most popular style of doors on the market?

Until the end of the 18^th century the French Riviera was an area unknown outside of France and barely known within it. The south east part of the Mediterranean coast was yet to be christened 'the French Riviera', or Cote

D’Azur as it is also known, for another hundred years as it took a while for the region to be popularised. This happened when doctors prescribed ‘climo-therepy’ recommending patients suffering a range of ailments take refuge from urban areas and absorb the fresh healthy air the seaside has to offer.

Climo-therapy boosted tourism in the UK but also abroad for those that could afford it and so the French Riviera’s first tourists were the British upper class. Robert Louis Stevenson was a fan that came for his health and even wrote some of his famous works there too. Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor returning year after year but it was during the second half of the 20^th Century that the region came to symbolise glitz and glamour. Just after the war the Cannes Film Festival was launched and with it, silver screen celebrity flowed from champagne flutes and around the roulette wheels as the new breed of wealthy tourist, the ‘Jet Set’, came to reside next to the likes of Bridget Bardot.

Lovely I’m sure but what’s that got to do with doors?

Well, the sophisticated interior design look within the hotels and mansions along the French Riviera is unquestionably traditional in style. They have simply smartened up the same style of doors and windows seen in the more rustic villas in the same region. And of course the term ‘French Door’ is a clue to how popular it is to have doors in France that bathe rooms with the drape of sunlight via an internal door window, something one comes to expect with the consist weather on the south coast of France. The style of the mansions or villas along the Mediterranean coast today still reflect traditional designs and so the Riviera door was born to capture the essence of them for a wider market. They don’t come with Monaco weather but they don’t come with a Monaco price tag either.

Images courtesy of sxc.hu