A shore thing: Konfekt’s summer issue is an ode to sun, sand and sea

The French Riviera is synonymous with striped awnings and a chic, beachy freedom that hovers in my mind’s eye. It is an idea of summer, as well as a place. As much as I crave discovery, it is always blissful to flex a familiar muscle, returning to the same rocky shores with new perspectives. Whenever I frequent the Côte d’Azur, its complexity shows itself – it is every bit as Graham Greene as it is Bonjour Tristesse. Small towns lie between wild nature reserves, nudist beaches, boatyards and military outposts.
 
A few years ago I found myself in and around the école navale in Toulon, not far from where submariner Jacques Cousteau pioneered the art of Aqua-Lung and scuba in the mid-20th century. Photographer Julien Oppenheim and I were shadowing some French navy seals for a Monocle report and were at one point required to leap from a motorboat onto a naval frigate as a tempestuous storm blew in. We explored the depths of a hyperbaric chamber used to treat the bends as we met a new cohort – all Cousteau’s disciples. I remember watching some young frogmen as they practised a drill for deep-sea technical diving, exclaiming how they found freedom 70 metres below. It was another side to the Côte d’Azur, every bit as intoxicating as mountains and beaches.

In the new issue of Konfekt, our travel special, we linger on the stretch of coast east of Cassis. In a report shot by Oppenheim and written by contributing editor Robert Bound, we spend time at the shipyards in La Ciotat and meet the hosts of old hôtels particuliersmade new, raise a glass with a coterie of artichoke farmers and natural vintners, and stop for a large pastis on the Ricard family’s private island, recently reopened as a hotel, with interiors that feel like an ode to the 1960s.
 
You’ll glimpse some familiar azure shores further up the coast on fashion editor Daphné Hézard’s shoot at the newly renovated hotel Le Provençal on the Presqu’île de Giens, where she styled this issue’s cover with a slew of breezy summer looks and dashing swimwear. The hotel has a coastal pool set into the rocky shore and an enviable clay tennis court. Designed by Paris-based Rodolphe Parente with help from Benjamin and Damien Piffet (the owners and grandsons of the hotel’s founder, Marius Michel), the interior features an art collection curated by Julie Liger, the deputy director of the nearby Villa Noailles. Daphné and her sister, Maud (who produced the shoot), were born and raised on the Riviera – and their work captures its essence.
 
My appetite for reading shifts rapidly as soon as the sun appears. Summer is a time for essays – those deep dives into niche and, usually, left-of-field subjects that your city self can’t and won’t process. The literature that we discover poolside or propped up on a rock on an Atlantic beach becomes part of our holiday too; it trickles into the fibre and feel of any itinerary. Up front, The Tone section introduces a clutch of brilliant new novels inspired by hotels; we meet an artist representing Somalia at the Venice art biennale; and columnist Barry Pierce dissects the celestial thinking of esoteric artist Hilma af Klint.
 
In our travel section we delve into the modernist heritage of Malta in an expansive report and our essays take aim at everything from the history of melons and the colour turquoise to a taxonomy of swimming strokes.
 
You are never far from the sea in this issue and features in our fashion section are littoral themed. Writer Laura Rysman’s report on northern Sicilian family business Asciari is a particularly striking portrait of an intergenerational venture producing fine garments using traditional skills. “Sicily has many layers,” says Marta Cigala of her brand’s minimalist aesthetic. “Farmers, fishermen, artisans, priests, nuns – look at their clothes from the 1940s and before. They were unadorned but beautifully crafted. We had an extraordinary tradition of tailors and fabric-making in Sicily and we still do – it has just been reduced.”
 
Perhaps my favourite piece in this issue is Chiara Rimella’s Conversations, a roundtable on the essence of islands, convened over lunch outside an 18th-century windmill on Greece’s Hydra. Her panellists exchanged ideas and even read passages from books that they loved over the course of lunch, touching on the idea that atolls, archipelagos, rocky outcrops and small islands loom large in our imaginations – be it Robert Louis Stevenson or Homeric shipwrecks. It’s a reminder of how islands mark our culture and minds, from their mythic past to our geopolitical present.
 
It just so happens that Hydra is the setting for one of my favourite summer books: Australian writer Charmian Clift’s Peel Me a Lotus, which documents her bohemian attempt to settle on the island with her young family in the 1950s, when there was very little running water, and where a revolving cast of artistically inclined expats infuriate and console each other in equal measure. The book encapsulates the freedom that we find on islands, despite their geographic limits. It reveals how our archetypal dreamy spots often have their quixotic allure and challenges too. But that, when swimming off some rocks in the azure-blue sea, they are nearly always worth contending with.

Sophie Grove is the editor of Konfekt and Monocle’s executive editor. Want to read the issue? Pick up a copy at the newsstand or order it here.