This arrangement is not a given in this area, he explains. “Because the houses are built on hillsides, the bedrooms are often downstairs and the living rooms are upstairs for the view. But that’s no good if you want to be with the kids round the pool.”

Nevertheless, the site dictates the layout of the house. The entrance hall is a mezzanine overlooking the double-height sitting room, reached by a sweeping staircase, and apart from the master suite (with “Joanne’s dressing room and the wardrobe she allows me to use”), all the bedrooms are on the ground floor.

Built directly into the rock at the back of the house, under the driveway, is a large, windowless playroom, a room full of gym machines and chiller cabinets of wine. “You have to have a good wine rack in France,” says Bannatyne, pointing out a shelf of bottles that cost “£3 in the supermarket and £60 in the Ivy. We just buy it by the case”.

There is a desk with a computer and a fax machine tucked into the corner of the hall, where he takes a morning call from his PA in the UK to deal with business, then “turns the BlackBerry off and goes in the pool with the kids”.

Bannatyne might not have warmed to the vendor, but he is more than happy with his house. He and Joanne have kitted it out with a comfortable, unpretentious mix of local antiques and furniture and rugs from the British house they sold four years ago for £1.3m (“The most expensive house ever sold in Darlington,” he says modestly). There’s a liberal sprinkling of family photos, and the walls are covered with art that ranges from Flemish-style tapestries to gilt-framed oils, modern watercolours and scenes of Provençal village life by a local artist called De Fontenay.

There was no urge to change things around, to “make their mark” on the property, as wealthy buyers are wont to do, with new kitchens and the like. In fact, he and Joanne, who met when she was director of nursing at his chain of old people’s homes, have made almost no changes inside, though he has installed a retractable pool cover and a pool heater — “It’s 31C at the moment.”

He loves the pretty coloured tiling in the large bathrooms, “the big showers, plenty of cupboard space. It has all the basics of a great holiday house. It’s well planned. I wouldn’t have done anything different”.

“He really plays out here,” says Joanne, adding that plenty of work gets done, too, and that her husband is rather more attached to the BlackBerry than he had made out to me. Unlike at Le Cannet, “we know our neighbours, and all our friends know our friends here now”.

As preparations get under way for a dinner party that will mix their house guests and local friends, the photographer and I take our leave. “He’s amazingly relaxed, isn’t he?” I say as we hurtle down the motorway to the airport. “If I had £300-odd million, I could be relaxed,” the photographer replies.

It’s not just the Riviera effect, then.

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