Beach Clubs — Part X, Satellite Houses

The type began in the 1930s, on rock, and it began without sand. Da Luigi ai Faraglioni opened at Capri in 1936, La Fontelina on the same shore in 1949, La Guérite off Cannes earlier still. Three of the four founding houses have no beach at all: they are platforms bolted to rock where a road cannot reach. Pampelonne, which everyone cites as the origin, is the outlier and the latest.

So the first invention here is a place, and exclusivity was its by-product rather than its design — you could not drive there. The second invention is a model, and it is dated: Blue Marlin at Cala Jondal in 2006 priced and reserved the sand by the table, and every house in this chapter now runs that mechanism, including the ones built seventy years earlier.

The unit sold is a day — arrival, lunch, music, sunset, departure — and the lounger, not the bed, is the inventory. Café del Mar added the fourth thing in 1980 by making the sunset a programmed event rather than a view that happens to be there.