Paz Palace

This guide to Paz Palace in Buenos Aires follows the newspaper man Jose Camilo Paz, who hired the French architect Louis Sortais in 1902 to design a house grand enough to embarrass every rival in the city, though Sortais never once crossed the ocean to see the site. It traces the twelve years of construction, with twenty craftsmen spending eight of them on the dining room alone, and Paz's death in Monaco in 1912, two years before the doors even opened to the family he built it for. His widow lived on afterward with a handful of relatives, tending one hundred forty rooms with seventy servants.