Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

This guide to Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild traces how Beatrice de Rothschild built her pink clifftop villa on a bare, wind-battered ridge of blasted rock, hauling in shiploads of topsoil just to plant her gardens. She asked landscape designer Achille Duchene to lay out her main garden after a specific memory, a transatlantic crossing aboard the ocean liner Ile de France that she never got over. By some accounts she sent home more than a dozen architects before finally settling on one in 1907.