The house is essentially one building split in two with no connecting door. 
The right hand side (as you face it) used to be where the ‘Guardian’ and his family lived to keep an eye on about 30,000 litres of Armagnac aging in giant oak barrels on the site.
After the Armagnac had been sold and we bought the property we found it difficult to describe each side, they were variously the left house and the right house of the Guardian’s house and ‘the other side’.
We tried various names but nothing stuck. The hamlet where ‘Magnol’ is located shares a name with the famous upmarket mediterranean resort ‘Cannes’. In the more famous of the two there is a stunning seafront crescent. Along ‘La Croisette’ there are a series of impressive five-star hotels charging eye watering prices. Towards the right end is The Martinez, a stunning art deco monolith. The Penthouse Suite, billed at $37,500 per night, is number 4 on CNN’s World’s 15 most expensive hotel suites.
Further left and closer to the town centre is the Carlton, the hotel featured in Elton John’s 1983 music video for the single, “I’m Still Standing”, and it was a central location for the Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. Both hotels play host to the rich and famous.
For a joke we decided call the two halves of the house we bought in ‘little’ Cannes, the Carlton and the Martinez. Strangely it stuck and now it feels like that’s what they’ve always been called.
Magnol 