Homes, hotels & restaurants
Villa Dubochet
- Type
- Historic villa
- Address
- Villa Dubochet 10, 1815 Clarens
Not open to visitors
Villa Dubochet, in the remarkable listed villa quarter of Clarens, was the home of Dad Régné, a figure of the Riviera’s nightlife. He had installed his private discotheque there and welcomed the stars passing through Lake Geneva: the Rolling Stones, the artist Keith Haring, the comedian Thierry Le Luron, the singers Julien Clerc and Véronique Sanson, and Grace Jones, with whom he had a relationship. The villa keeps the memory of those years when the Riviera drew, away from the spotlight, part of the musical jet set.
Dad Régné and the villa of the Montreux nights
A child of the party
Born in Thonon during the Second World War, Dad Régné arrived in Montreux as a refugee, with his grandmother, mother and sister; his father, an officer, died in France. First a precision mechanic, he became a self-taught decorator and opened a shop on the Rue de Bourg in Lausanne. Everything changed in the 1960s when the singer Adamo entrusted him with decorating his house and a studio in Belgium: a friendship formed, doors opened.
The king of nightclubs
“At one time, three quarters of the nightclubs in Lausanne had been decorated by my father,” recalls his son Patrick. He turned the Darling into a garden of ancient Rome, furnished the Snob with giant bellows for tables, and recreated a Paris metro station in Oron-le-Châtel. Layering antiques, centuries and styles, drawing on Dalí and Magritte, he also collected horse-drawn carriages, more than forty in all, out of a taste for old-world living.
The villa and its stars
In his villa in the Dubochet estate at Clarens, Dad Régné set up his private nightclub and drew celebrities: the Rolling Stones, Keith Haring, Thierry Le Luron, Julien Clerc, Véronique Sanson, and Grace Jones, with whom he had a relationship. Married three times, he cultivated an art of entertaining that fed his legend.
The Alcazar saga
Having come to negotiate door fittings in one of the Grand Hôtel de Territet’s buildings, he discovered a hall forgotten by all and fell in love with it. While the owner wanted to raze it for a car park, he bought it, restored it and founded a restaurant, a museum for his carriages and the Théâtre de l’Alcazar, with dinner-shows, parties and concerts. Ravaged by a fire in 1984, the Alcazar was reborn in 1990 with Grace Jones headlining, before a second fire, in 2012, hastened its decline.
The guardian of heritage
To him we also owe the preservation of several Montreux jewels: the Dubochet villas, where he lived, the covered market and the Alcazar. A tenacious president of the association for the protection of Montreux’s sites, he died on 18 February 2023, a few months short of his 82nd birthday. “He left his mark on Montreux nights, and its days too,” says former mayor Laurent Wehrli (24 heures).
Related artists :The Rolling Stones