Parc de la Cerisaie

This guide to Parc de la Cerisaie in Lyon follows silk-dyeing tycoon Paul Gillet as he builds a neo-Florentine villa on the hillside above his family's noisy, foul-smelling dye works, planting some twelve hundred trees to wall the house off from the industry that paid for it. It traces the estate from the Gillet family's six decades of private use through a 1976 sale to the city, when an empty mansion sat unwatched. Look for the initials cut into the old gate's ironwork, a signature left by Paul's grandfather Francois.