Among rock music fans, it is known as the recording location of the 1972 album Exile on Main St. by the English band The Rolling Stones.

In the late 1890s, a former banker, Eugene Thomas, built the imposing villa fronted with marble Ionic columns.

[citation needed] The Villa Nellcôte was leased from April 1971 to October 1973 by Keith Richards, guitarist of The Rolling Stones.

[2] Richards claimed that during the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940s, Villa Nellcôte had served as the headquarters of the local Gestapo, with the floor vents in the basement reportedly being decorated with swastikas.

With the war turning against them and an invasion expected on the Côte d'Azur, it seems unlikely that the Germans would have spent those 11 months getting local foundries to make custom cast-iron ventilation grates adorned with a swastika motif.