Patrick Diter must have thought his luck had run out when La Cour de Cassation, France’s highest judicial court, ruled in December 2020 that the dream house he’d illegally built in the South of France over the past 20 years, a 30,000-square-foot, faux-Italianate Xanadu estimated to have cost upwards of $60 million, needed to be destroyed.
There were no more appeals possible. Time had run out. All that remained was the wrecking ball, swung either by his own hand—within an 18-month grace period—or by the French state’s afterward.
