Monet's House and Gardens, Giverny

Few gardens in the world were made so deliberately to be painted. When Claude Monet came upon Giverny from a train window in the spring of 1883, it was a village of fewer than three hundred people on the Epte, just across the Seine from Vernon. He rented a long pink farmhouse with grey shutters known as Le Pressoir, the cider press, painted the shutters green, and began turning the orchard in front of it into the flower garden now called the Clos Normand. He bought the property in 1890 and kept reshaping it for the rest of his life, eventually employing half a dozen gardeners and growing some seventy species, with a man in a small boat whose only job was to keep the lily pond and its leaves clean.

The second garden lies across the old railway line and the road. In 1893 Monet bought a marshy plot crossed by a diverted arm of the Epte and, after a fight with neighbours who feared his exotic plants would poison their water, received permission to dig a pond "for the pleasure of the eyes and in order to have subjects to paint". A local craftsman built the arched green footbridge that became known as the Japanese bridge; the pond was later enlarged several times, given its final curving outline after the great flood of 1910, and planted with giant bamboo and weeping willows. These few acres produced the water lily paintings that hang in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, many of them worked up in the huge skylit studio Monet built on the property in 1915, a building he admitted he was ashamed of for spoiling the village.

After Monet's death in 1926 his stepdaughter Blanche Hoschedé-Monet kept everything as it was, but once she died in 1947 the place fell apart: birds flew through broken studio windows, the pond silted up and termites ate into the bridge. His son Michel left the estate to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1966, and restoration began in the late 1970s under Gérald Van der Kemp, the curator who had revived Versailles, largely funded by American donors. The Fondation Claude Monet opened the house and gardens in 1980. Inside, the rooms have been returned to their original colours, from the two-tone yellow dining room to the blue-tiled kitchen, and Monet's own bedroom was reconstructed in 2013 from the descriptions of visitors who knew it.

What to look for is the contrast between the two halves. The Clos Normand is laid out in straight beds packed with colour, planned like a palette; the water garden is shadowy and reflective, all surfaces and floating leaves, best in the soft light of early morning or late afternoon. An underpass links the two, so visitors pass from one mood to the other without seeing the road.

Getting there

The house and gardens are in the village of Giverny, about 5.6 km from Vernon, whose Vernon-Giverny station has trains from Paris and Rouen; a shuttle bus runs from the station to the village. The nearest airport is Beauvais-Tillé (BVA), about 60 km away, though the Paris airports are the usual gateway.