Hyères old town and the Villa Noailles

Hyères is the oldest resort on this coast and its old town is genuinely medieval: a knot of stepped lanes and vaulted passages behind the Porte Massillon, the Tour des Templiers on Place Massillon, the collegiate church of Saint-Paul with its stone stairway, and a path that keeps climbing past the Parc Saint-Bernard to the ruins of the castle on the hill. From the top you look down on the whole plain, the salt pans and the islands.

The villa is the counterweight and the reason photographers come. Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles commissioned Robert Mallet-Stevens to build it from 1923: a long white modernist house of cubes, terraces, pergolas and cut-out windows on the slope below the castle, once a meeting place for Man Ray, Cocteau, Buñuel and Giacometti, and now a public art centre. It is a set of hard geometry, white walls and framed rectangles of sea — the exact opposite of the old town two hundred metres downhill.

That contrast is the session: half an hour of warm stone, arches and stepped lanes, then half an hour of white planes and shadow. Morning light suits the old town, when the east-facing lanes catch the sun and the cafés on Place Massillon are still setting up; the villa is better in the late afternoon, when the low sun makes long shadows across the terraces.

Entry to the villa is normally free but it closes on some weekdays and between exhibitions, and it hosts an international fashion and photography festival each year when the whole building is given over — so check the opening days, the festival dates and the rules on tripods and commercial shoots before you build a session around the terraces.