A First Look at Monaco’s Mareterra Multibillion Dollar Neighborhood – Robb

Loïc Thébaud

Portier is a turn in the road familiar to Formula 1 fans, a double right-hander that tees up one of the trickier stretches of Monaco’s Grand Prix circuit, where drivers tear through a tunnel whose aerodynamics can snap a third of a car’s downforce. Portier is where Ayrton Senna famously wrecked late in the race in 1988, after leading for 67 laps, handing victory to rival Alain Prost. But soon, this tiny corner of a tiny country (at 499 acres, it’s bested only by Vatican City for the title of Europe’s smallest state) will be famous for entirely different reasons. The forest of cranes that have sat on the waterfront in its backyard for more than a decade will vanish next year, heralding the end of a multi-billion-dollar project as well as the opening of an entirely new neighborhood, located on a plot of man-made land bolted to this strip of coastline. Called Mareterra, it will be home to what its developers hope will be the most expensive real estate anywhere in the world. 

Reclaiming land from the sea here is not a new idea. Monaco has nibbled greedily at the surrounding waters for decades—since the 1950s, 20 percent of the principality’s surface area has been created this way. Yet Mareterra is one of the most ambitious efforts to date, a 14-acre district that will increase the country’s size by 3 percent. The project has been surrounded by secrecy and rumor, but Robb Report was granted exclusive first access to preview the site, which boasts a name-dropper’s dream of assorted starchitects. Renzo Piano helmed the ultra-luxury 50-unit building that’s named in his honor, while Stefano Boeri, Tadao Ando, and Sir Norman Foster are among the names who have designed properties in the 10-strong villa collection—in Ando’s case, a complementary adjacent pair nestled in the southwestern corner. Paris-based Valode & Pistre, whose projects have included the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux and the Clarins headquarters in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, oversaw the master planning as well as the design of the family-focused Les Jardins d’Eau apartment complex, while the green spaces fell to landscape architect Michel Desvigne, who has juggled teaching at Harvard with creating outdoor environments for the likes of Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, and Herzog and de Meuron. For Mareterra, Desvigne emphasized local pines rather than the palm trees once imported en masse as evocative exotica. There’s also ample public space, including a half-mile-long promenade at the water’s edge, plus an extension of the Grimaldi Forum exhibition building and a mixed-use marina with 16 slips for residents and visitors. 

The best guide to the site is Guy Thomas Levy-Soussan. The 50-something Monegasque banker joined developer Patrice Pastor on the project six years ago after living and working around the world, including an extended stint on Wall Street. He’s a genial, energetic presence striding between the near-finished structures of the construction site, undeterred by the heat of a June day and a clammy plastic safety vest. He’s surprisingly informal, too—a small blue friendship bracelet peeks out past his crisp white cuff, and his quiff quavers in the breeze. At the outset of the tour, Levy-Soussan emphasizes the aspects that differentiate this district from the ever-present redevelopment elsewhere in Monaco. Those other buildings are often awkwardly wedged onto the steep hillside like the world’s most expensive Legos, the design pretzeled into whatever footprint is available. By contrast, at Mareterra, the developers started with a blank slate, giving themselves—and the clutch of design talent—leeway to indulge every whim.

“When you buy an apartment in Monaco, there’s always a compromise,” he says. “This was our statement: to be unique and offer what did not exist.” 

The project was named L’Anse du Portier, or Portier Cove, but the new district will officially be known as Mareterra on maps. It was Prince Albert II who picked the name from a short list. “It was my favorite, too,” says Levy-Soussan, “because when the architects talked about the project, they talked about the sea and the ground together here.” The royal family has been integral to the development beyond simply naming it: Expanding the country with a reclamation effort became a pet project for the prince soon after he acceded to the throne. (As this issue went to press, several close advisers to the prince stood accused of accepting payments for real-estate projects, but neither Albert nor the…