History

This exceptional house in an exceptional setting belonged to an equally exceptional couple: Henri-Germain Delauze, founder and president of Comex, and his wife Andrée Pham Van, whom he affectionately nicknamed Philbée. Together, they spent the last thirty years of their lives here, watching their children grow and weathering the ups and downs of company life—its successes as well as its challenges. A company they founded together in October 1961, just under ten years after meeting at a private gathering in Saint-Raphaël.

In January 1953, he joined Spiros, a company manufacturing compressors and high-pressure industrial gas and air systems. At the time, he was already passionate about a discipline that had until then been reserved for a small elite: scuba diving. Indeed, in the early 1950s, a major innovation had just emerged. Developed during the war years by a young naval officer then unknown, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and a highly ingenious engineer, Émile Gagnan, the regulator that bears their names made it possible for the first time for divers to carry an air supply on their backs.

Until then, diving other than freediving required wearing a heavy diving suit supplied with air via a long hose from the surface.

As soon as he experienced this new freedom, Delauze was fascinated—utterly captivated—by the spectacle before him and by the ease with which he could move through the liquid element using this machine

In 1951, the latter came to Marseille for the first time with his new exploration vessel, La Calypso, a former minesweeper that he had been able to convert into an oceanographic research ship thanks to the patronage of a renowned Irish brewer, Loël Guinness, owner of the eponymous beer brand.

Beuchat introduced Delauze to Cousteau, who was looking for young divers for a major first: the underwater archaeological excavation of a Roman shipwreck sunk near Grand Congloué, off the calanques of Marseille, in the same area where, half a century later, diver Luc Vanrell would rediscover the wreck of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Lightning P-38, which disappeared at the end of July 1944—an investigation in which Henri-Germain Delauze would play an active role, as we shall see later. Young, an engineer, and a diver, he had everything to appeal to Cousteau. Everything, that is, except a very strong personality—something the man in the red cap did not always tolerate easily.

Their collaboration nevertheless lasted until 1956, with its ups and downs, and it was Delauze who ultimately cut ties after a final confrontation: the departure of La Calypso to shoot the film The Silent World without him. “The problem with Cousteau,” he often explained when questioned about the reasons for their falling-out, “is that one could only work FOR him, not WITH him.”

Although rigour and order were among his core values, Delauze could not imagine remaining indefinitely in a subordinate role, in keeping with the old principle that you do not make two crocodiles swim in the same marsh.

In 1956, he therefore accepted a position with Grands Travaux de Marseille (GTM), which had just secured a contract to build an immersed road tunnel in the Bay of Havana, Cuba.

It would be Saint-Nicolas, a project that Henri and Philbée began to envision in the mid-1970s, when the couple purchased from the Terrin naval repair shipyards this magnificent 7,000-square-metre plot nestled between Fort Ganteaume, Fort Saint-Nicolas and the Pharo hill.

It would nevertheless take several years of patience and a good deal of persuasion on Henri’s part to convince the mayor, Gaston Defferre, and the various relevant authorities to grant the permits and authorisations required to build an exceptional residence and a small office building on the site. The key argument that ultimately won Defferre over was Comex’s need for a kind of secondary headquarters, where the company’s chairman and his main associates could welcome their most prestigious clients and partners in the most emblematic setting Marseille has to offer: the southern shore of the Old Port, with an unobstructed view of the two Vauban forts that guard its entrance while keeping watch over Marseille, already notorious for its turbulent character as early as the 17th century.

Confident that, sooner or later, he would bring the mayor of Marseille around to his cause, Delauze began to reflect on the outlines of his project in the months following the acquisition of the land in 1975. He turned to the Marseille-based architectural firm Delta, entrusting it with the task of designing a new complex that would meet both the company’s needs and his own expectations, for the professional as well as the private sections. Founded some twenty years earlier, the firm then brought together the leading figures of local architecture: Pierre Averous, Louis Dallest, Raymond Perrachon, Yves Bonnel and Bernard Tarrazi.

It was, however, to a young associate, Harald Sylvander, that the founders of the Delta Agency entrusted the project and its management. In 1977, Yves Bonnel and Bernard Tarrazi had in fact joined the municipal majority and become part of the small group of Gaston Defferre’s deputy mayors drawn from civil society. If their choice fell on Sylvander, it was certainly to avoid any suspicion of a conflict of interest between their firm and their municipal roles, but above all because the young architect had already studied the Saint-Nicolas site in great detail for the previous owner, who had planned to rebuild a modern naval repair workshop there before encountering serious financial difficulties and being forced to sell the plot to the Delauze family.

“At the time,” the architect recalls, “I often handled the agency’s most unusual projects at Delta.” The Comex project was one of them, and Sylvander threw himself into it with enthusiasm. “The first time we met about it,” he explains, “Henri and Philbée Delauze invited me to spend a few days on holiday with them at their second home in southern Corsica, so that I could see how they lived and discuss the project calmly.” For his design, Sylvander therefore drew inspiration from the Californian villas the Delauze family had so greatly enjoyed in San Francisco, but above all from Vietnamese floating houses—the country of origin of Philbée’s father—entirely built from plant-based materials.

Initially, it was indeed this secondary headquarters that the architect worked on. On the seafront side, he placed what Delauze then called the “Club Comex,” a house where he planned to live and to welcome prestigious clients and partners. On the Boulevard Charles-Livon side, he imagined a small office complex to accommodate the company’s main directors and those of its subsidiaries.

To the original plans, Harald Sylvander nevertheless added a secretariat and a small executive office, extending the house initially envisioned. In terms of form, Henri knew exactly what he wanted: a single-storey residence inspired by Californian architecture, with more glass than walls opening onto the sea and nature, ample space for the whole family, and room to welcome friends and distinguished guests. A haven in the truest sense of the word, where the head of the company could rest with his family between business trips and keep his boat within sight, always ready to set sail.

By the late 1970s, architectural boldness also meant starting with a wooden frame, building half of the usable surface not on solid ground but above the water, covering the roof of the house with copper plates, and installing a bathroom in a veranda opening onto the swimming pool and the vast garden. “In the early days, when the project still included offices,” recalls Harald Sylvander, “we did not choose to build part of the house on stilts simply for the pleasure of being above the water, but because Henri Delauze wanted to make the best possible use of the garden and optimise the space between the offices, which were to be built against the boulevard wall, and the house, positioned as close to the sea as possible.”

Once the office component was abandoned, the idea of a house suspended one metre above the waters of the Old Port remained, for the beauty of the gesture and for Henri’s pride.

“As for the wood,” explains the architect, “our choice fell on iroko, which is rot-proof, withstands exposure to seawater very well, and requires no specific treatment—neither oil nor varnish.”

Before construction could begin, however, a building permit was required—one that Gaston Defferre granted without hesitation—but above all, it was necessary to convince the Architect of the Buildings of France, who had a say in the design of the house given its location at the foot of Forts Ganteaume and Saint-Nicolas and facing Fort Saint-Jean. “We reached a compromise with her by committing to leave the wood visible in its natural state and by covering the roof with copper, which turns green as it oxidises,” recalls Sylvander, who had made every effort to blend the building as seamlessly as possible into the existing landscape. The same approach was taken with the private squash court, which ultimately replaced the office building at the rear of the plot, against the retaining wall of Boulevard Charles-Livon.

To bring his dream to life, the company’s founder spared no expense. He selected his contractors from among the finest specialists in Marseille, across all trades. For the structure and timber frame of the house, he chose Jean Morel, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, who personally selected the finest iroko logs on the docks of Sète and Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône. For the masonry work, the Chagnaud company was commissioned to carry out all the solid construction elements, starting with the piers supporting the stilts, largely poured beneath the sea.

As for the interior fittings and decoration, they were entrusted to Bernard Jourdeneaud, whom the Delauze family had already called upon a few years earlier for their apartment at the end of Quai de Rive-Neuve, at the far end of the Old Port.

The construction work lasted a little over 18 months, beginning at the end of 1979.

The family finally moved in in April 1981, at a time when Comex was still enjoying sound economic health. During the first few years, Henri ultimately spent little time there, busy as he was managing the projects and operations the company was conducting across the globe.

Three years later, the oil and offshore markets took another downturn, and Saint-Nicolas became more than ever his refuge. When he was there, Philbée watched over him and over the house with care and discipline. “If he returned from a trip and went to bed to recover from jet lag,” Michèle Fructus would fondly recall, “my mother imposed absolute silence throughout the house, and anyone who dared disobey by making the floorboards creak immediately received a murderous look and a finger pointing toward the door.”

Ten years after fully taking possession of the property, Henri and Philbée experienced from Saint-Nicolas the most painful period in Comex’s history, the one that would lead to the sale of the company to the Norwegian group Stolt. Although still a world leader in its field, with rising revenues and solid profitability, Comex’s results were weighed down by financial costs linked to its debt. Despite his efforts throughout the 1980s, Henri-Germain Delauze was unable to restructure the company’s capital in a satisfactory way and was ultimately forced to relinquish its independence.