With the villa, the Weisweillers started a new chapter in their life. Francine invited her good friend and the legendary designer Madeleine Castaing to work on the interiors. She was often called an eccentric decorator. Some people even said that she had an insane sense of style. But everyone agreed that Madeleine had its own unusual manner that later was followed by many aficionados.
Francine became part of the social scene. She was a friend and client of Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Coco Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent. In 1949, Ms. Weisweiller met Jean Cocteau. He was shooting "Les Enfants Terribles", the movie being made of his famous novel. The leading role belonged to Nicole Stéphane (born Nicole de Rothschild), the French actress of the banking clan and the cousin of Alec Weisweiller. She introduced Cocteau to Francine.
Shortly after that meeting Ms. Weisweiller invited the director to spend a vacation in her villa. Jean Cocteau kindly accepted the offer and arrived together with his adopted son Edouard Dermit, who played the role of Paul in "Les Enfants Terribles". Very soon the artist felt that he was tired of idleness. "I wither here," he told Francine and proposed to draw something above the fireplace in the living room. The first image turned out to be Apollo's head, the Greek god of music, poetry, and art. That is how Cocteau began painting the walls of the estate.
Few months later, the whole house was covered with drawings that Cocteau used to call "tattoos". He said: "I didn't have to dress the walls. I had to paint on their skin, that's why I treated the frescoes linearly, with few colors that enhanced the tattoos. Santo Sospir is a tattooed villa".
When Cocteau made the very first tattoo, he showed it to his friend Henri Matisse, who had been living on the French Riviera. The painter found it beautiful and said: "When you decorate a wall, you decorate the others". Pablo Picasso also supported Cocteau and advised him to go on painting. Cocteau said: "Picasso opened and closed all doors; so it remained to paint on the doors: this is what I tried to do. But the doors open in the rooms; the rooms have walls, and if the doors are painted, the walls look empty…"
The artist covered almost every wall of the house without sketches. He tattooed the walls in charcoal and after that he put colored powder that was prepared specially for him by an Italian workman. Those pigments were mixed with raw milk. This technique is called frescoes in tempera. In total Cocteau created around 200 tattoos. Sometimes he didn't move the furniture and draw directly over objects.
In 1951, the artist decorated ceilings and created two mosaics for the patio next year. Tapestry, one of the main attractions of the villa, was also designed by Cocteau. It was made on the legendary Aubusson tapestry manufacture, which is known since the 16th century, granted the status of Royal Manufacture and actually it is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Also, in 1948 Jean Cocteau made a sketch of the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes and sent it to the manufacture. It took five years for weavers to make it. Finally, in 1953 the tapestry was finished and occupied a whole wall.
Jean Cocteau returned to the villa every summer and stayed there for almost eleven years. He once said: "When I was working at Santo Sospir, I became myself a wall and these walls spoke for me". The artist even made a 35-minute film about the estate, "La Villa Santo-Sospir."