Béatrice de Rothschild lived in two of the era’s most opulent residences: in Paris, in an eighteenth-century palace in Rue Saint-Florentin, at the north-east corner of the Place de la Concorde; and in the countryside, in Ferrières, in an enormous château built by her grandfather, James.

After the divorce, Béatrice turned her attention to one of her great passions: collecting art. She had inherited her keen eye and her taste for beautiful objects from her family. The family motto was ‘Ars Patriae Decus’: ‘Art is the honour of the fatherland’. She acquired a Tiepolo ceiling, eighteenth-century furniture, a games table that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, a rug commissioned by Louis XIV…

Béatrice was especially fastidious when it came to the choice of an architect. The projects proposed by Claude Girault, architect of the Petit Palais and Henri-Paul Nénot, designer of the new Sorbonne, were rejected. Architect Jacques-Marcel Auburtin was eventually entrusted with the design of the Villa, having scrupulously met all of Béatrice Ephrussi’s requirements. 

The Baroness Ephrussi de Rothschild made her Villa a true haven for art collectors with porcelain, furniture and paintings by the Great Masters. The Villa was decorated in the Rothschild style, i.e., with the best from each era, resulting in a somewhat eclectic mix!

When the Baroness moved into the Villa, four hectares of the gardens were still to be landscaped. The Baroness had given priority to the French formal garden. She created a veritable mobile and living decor: it was not uncommon to see her employees hidden in pyramids of green cardboard, representing cypress trees, or manoeuvring long strips of silver, grey and green fabric in an attempt to determine the exact location of the ponds, driveways and flower beds…

In 1933, a year before her death, Beatrice bequeathed her Villa and the entirety of its collections to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Académie also received the 7 hectares of land and some 5,000 works of art.

That same year, the landscape architect Louis Marchand was entrusted with designing the themed gardens of the estate: a Spanish, Florentine, Japanese, and Mexican garden. He also had water put in the fountains and renovated the French formal gardens.

When Louis Marchand returned to the Villa after the war, he quickly began work on the badly neglected gardens, soon restoring them to their pre-war splendour.  The building was also renovated, and a new colour scheme chosen for the facades: once ochre yellow, the Villa was painted in reddish-pink hues, providing it with a Venetian air.

1985 was marked by a particularly harsh winter. The estate lost many of its tall, beautiful trees and almost all of the Mexican garden. The Marnier Lapostolle family, who lived in the neighbouring villa and the owners of a remarkable collection of cacti and rare plants, offered many of the plants from their own collection to the Villa Ephrussi in an effort to restore the devastated Mexican garden, today referred to as the ‘exotic garden’.