The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild is an Italianate villa built between 1905 and 1912 by Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild on the isthmus of Cap-Ferrat, surrounded by nine themed gardens. Bequeathed to the Institut de France, it is open all year. The view takes in two bays at once, Villefranche and Beaulieu.
Béatrice de Rothschild, married to a Russian banker whom she divorced, inherited an immense fortune and decided, at forty, to have a house built on the finest plot on the Côte d'Azur. In 1905 she bought seven hectares on the isthmus of Cap-Ferrat, an arid wind-blown promontory, and had the rock blasted so that she could plant a garden.
She changed architect seven times, drew up the plans herself using models, had the façades repainted until she got exactly the pink she wanted, and bought whole pieces of Italian palaces, columns, doors and chimneypieces, which she built into her villa. She named the house Île-de-France, after an ocean liner she had travelled on, and dressed her gardeners as sailors, complete with red-pompom caps.
It is that obstinacy that makes the visit so unusual: you are not visiting a villa, you are visiting a will.
They are the point, and there are nine of them, fanning out around the house.
The French garden at the centre, laid out like a ship's deck, with a long basin whose fountains play to music every twenty minutes, and a Temple of Love at the far end. Then, going down, the Spanish garden and its shaded gallery, the Florentine garden, the stone garden peopled with Gothic sculpture, the Japanese garden, the rose garden at the point, the exotic cactus garden, the Provençal garden of pines and lavender, and the Sèvres garden.
The circuit takes an hour, largely in shade, with the sea on either side. A tea room under the arcades looks out over the bay of Villefranche.
The interior has been kept furnished as it was in the baroness's day: eighteenth-century furniture, Sèvres and Vincennes porcelain, Gobelins tapestries, paintings by Boucher and Fragonard, painted panels taken from Paris town houses. The covered patio, on two levels, with its glass roof and pink marble columns, is the finest room.
Visiting unaccompanied is enough; guided tours of the private first-floor apartments are offered at certain times.
Cap-Ferrat deserves that you stay. The coastal path goes round it in two hours; it is flat, shaded and free, and it passes below some of the most expensive villas in Europe. The Villa Santo Sospir, decorated by Cocteau, and the Villa Kérylos at Beaulieu, a reconstruction of an ancient Greek house, round off the day for anyone who enjoys this kind of folly.
This guide is part of the address book of a private estate in Puget-sur-Argens, 70 minutes away, available for weddings and family stays. It is not open to visitors.
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