Cinemagoers watching the Downton Abbey: A New Period movie might effectively discover themselves drooling over the splendid Belle-Époque villa the Crawley household decamps to within the South of France.
The excellent news is, followers can truly rent the villa for personal use – in the event that they occur to have £42,000 per week to spare.
La Villa Rocabella, in Le Pradet close to Toulon on the Cote d’Azur, stood in for the household’s “Villa of the Doves” within the film sequel, which hit cinemas on Friday.
Owned by a rich French expertise entrepreneur, it was purchased for £12m in 2020 and is now primarily employed for conferences and ultra-wealthy personal occasions.
The marriage-cake villa, framed by tall palms, sleeps as much as 46 company (together with cottages on the grounds) and is about in three hectares of pristine French Riviera woodland. Hyeres airport is a 15km-drive away.
In true aristocratic Downton model, it comes with an outside, heated swimming pool and Jacuzzi, lounge with fire, petanque court docket and yoga deck.
A nonetheless from the brand new Downton Abbey film A New Period
(Ben Blackall / ©2022 Focus Options LLC)
Non-public-hire company additionally benefit from the providers of a chef, maitre d’resort and housekeeper, whereas kiteboarding, paddle-boarding, scuba diving and crusing actions are provided on its small seaside.
The conference-booking web site Kactus.com provides a quote of €23,000 (£19,327) an evening for hiring the villa at full capability.
These on a smaller price range can rent the extra modest homes on the property, such because the four-bedroom cottage.
The villa has additionally appeared onscreen in An Ideally suited Man (2014), Les estivants (2018), and The Man Who Bought His Pores and skin (2019).
The film is a sequel to Downton Abbey’s first function movie outing in 2019, and stars Hugh Dancy, Laura Haddock, Nathalie Baye and Dominic West.
The movie’s producers instructed Condé Nast Traveller that La Villa Rocabella had been chosen from a shortlist of 5 earlier than manufacturing.
“We’ve by no means seen the household journey past their very own shores earlier than. I’d all the time needed to convey the Crawleys to Europe and to the Riviera particularly as a result of it is part of Europe that the English higher courses would have visited,” mentioned producer Gareth Neame.
“It neglected the Mediterranean and it had attractive gardens and its personal little secluded seaside,” added fellow producer Liz Trubridge.
“It offered plenty of area and vistas for dinners exterior on the terrace – conditions we’d hardly ever see the Crawleys in.”
Manufacturing designer Donal Woods instructed CNT that the workforce had crammed the largely empty property with modern Nineteen Twenties artwork.
“The English aristocracy would have had plenty of heavy gilt framed work and household portraits of their house and the French had been a little bit extra fashionable and ahead considering at the moment,” he mentioned.
“We crammed the rooms with just a few items of Nineteen Twenties ‘fashionable artwork’, however largely we had naked partitions and much much less furnishings as a result of it was a vacation house.”
