Château La Coste’s Paddy McKillen: ‘I don’t mean this in a bombastic way, but it has turned out to be something pretty amazing’

Turning off a wooded track around 30 minutes’ drive north of Aix-en-Provence, you come to a clearing. In the middle is a giant bronze spider, nearly 30 feet wide, impossibly balanced on the glassy surface of an ornamental lake and surrounded by sun-baked fields of twisted vines. The sculpture is one of Louise Bourgeois’s unmistakable arachnids. The pool is the work of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando. This is a vineyard unlike any other.

Château La Coste is a 600-acre estate that combines three of the passions of entrepreneur Paddy McKillen: winemaking, hospitality and art.

Born in Belfast, McKillen had left school by the time he moved to Dublin with his family aged 16. After making exhausts and other metal items for his father’s motor repair business, he moved into property — first shops, then hotels, including stakes in four of London’s most famous addresses: Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Berkeley and The Savoy. He bought a winery in Mendoza, and around 2003 acquired Château La Coste.

McKillen has said he was so taken with its magic that he was only halfway down the drive when he decided to buy it. He spent the best part of a decade reshaping the neglected farm to his own unique vision, employing a concentration of talent that most capital cities would envy.

Renzo Piano designed a subterranean space topped with white sails, which combines exhibition rooms and a wine cellar. Richard Rogers created a cantilevered gallery supported by bright-orange beams, which appears to hang perilously off the top of a hill. Oscar Niemeyer’s stark, white, curved gallery and auditorium — the last building the Brazilian designed shortly before his death in 2012, aged 104 — was built among the vines of Vermentino grapes. And Frank Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine Pavilion was reassembled on the property.

McKillen has been compared to a skilled conductor, operating to bring out the best in his collaborators. ‘I simply asked our best friends to design amazing spaces,’ he has said. ‘And at first, they didn’t really want to. But by coaxing and humour and friendship and love and meals…’

Ando, a long-time collaborator, built McKillen a ‘contemplation environment’ and refurbished the site’s chapel, adding a glass altar that radiates each morning as the sun streams in. The architect’s art centre, which greets visitors — piercing the entrance pool’s calm water with its angular, polished concrete form — was specifically designed to accommodate Bourgeois’s Crouching Spider; she only agreed to sell it to McKillen after he proposed the setting to her.

‘In 2006, when Patrick McKillen first approached me to design a “sanctuary of art” within a vineyard near Aix-en-Provence, I had my doubts about its feasibility,’ Ando revealed in the foreword to Château La Coste: Art and Architecture in Provence (2020). ‘But I considered his proposal because the site was situated in the auspicious land that created Cezanne, the forefather of modern painting.

‘For a businessman as erudite as Patrick, the project seems like a hobby. However, this foray into art, architecture and wine is by no means a dilettante affair, but an endeavour into which he pours his entire heart.’

The pavilions host multiple exhibitions at any one time. Shows have been dedicated to Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alberto Giacometti and Ai Weiwei, as well as mid-career artists including Sophie Calle, Claire Tabouret, and currently, Rashid Johnson.

The most recent show consisted of nine paintings by Julian Schnabel. They spanned half a century of his career as an artist, from early plaster-and-wire works to a 2023 self-portrait from his series of canvases covered in smashed plates. All borrowed from private collections, they were brought together by Schnabel’s friend, the philologist and head of contemporary programmes at the Louvre, Donatien Grau.

At a gala lunch in the garden of the estate’s private, pastel-pink 17th-century bastide, 74-year-old Schnabel — wearing his trademark fedora and painter’s overalls — told his family, friends and supporters that McKillen’s fantasy proved what art is capable of.

The estate is also home to around 50 works that don’t require controlled temperature or light, or a wall to hang on, placed around the grounds. Several hours’ hiking, following a map through valleys and forests, reveals sculptures by Alexander Calder, Tracey Emin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Annie Morris, Sean Scully, Per Kirkeby, Lee Ufan, Yoshitomo Nara and more.

McKillen has always insisted he didn’t just want sculptures ‘plonked’ around a landscape. ‘I didn’t set out to create a “sculpture park” — that phrase makes me shiver,’ he once said. ‘There is a science to where the pieces are located. I’ve studied the land and done walks. And I don’t mean this in a bombastic way, but it has turned out to be something pretty amazing.’

Set on a hill crowning the entire plot is Villa La Coste, a 31-suite hotel. It opened in 2016 and became one of the first properties in the world to receive the Michelin Guide’s ‘Three Keys’ award. It was conceived as an unusually cultured home-from-home: the residences, lobby, library, bar and restaurants exhibit McKillen’s personal art trove, which he has built up voraciously over more than 30 years, earning a place on the ARTnews ‘Top 200 Collectors’ list.

Villa La Coste’s display reveals how discerning he is. There are works by Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Kippenberger and Gerhard Richter. Above the breakfast buffet is a Matisse line drawing. One of Ed Ruscha’s iconic text paintings hangs near a poker room. A collection of antique Japanese netsuke are displayed in a glass cabinet by the lifts. And guests checking in are invited to sit on a George Nakashima bench and thumb through art books stacked on a Charlotte Perriand table.

‘We change things between every season,’ explains Daniel Kennedy, the estate’s art director. A fellow former resident of Belfast, he was working at White Cube when McKillen asked if he was interested in helping him set up ‘a small project’ in the south of France. ‘We’re constantly rehanging things, moving pictures every few months, even re-upholstering the furniture and changing the colour of the walls,’ says Kennedy.

Then there is the wine: under McKillen’s tenure, Château La Coste has become the largest organic vineyard in France, run on entirely biodynamic principles. Horses are used to till the soil, grapes are harvested by hand, and each plot is cultivated individually, allowing its micro-terroir to sing. Bottling takes place inside a pair of futuristic hangars designed by Jean Nouvel.

Elsewhere on the property is a 76-room inn, as well as half a dozen restaurants and cafés — including one helmed by the celebrity chef Francis Mallmann.

Yet McKillen has revealed that he might only be about halfway to realising his masterplan. ‘I hate to say it, but I am a control freak,’ he recently admitted. ‘Château La Coste has to be driven by a person. It’s not a project that can be driven by committee. It’s a project based on people that I’ve come into contact with — that I love, that I admire, that I’m inspired by.’

Rashid Johnson presents an exhibition of painting, sculpture and film in the Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer, Château La Coste, until 17 January 2027

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