Désert de Retz

Interesting facts

The broken column measures about 15 metres across and rises some 25 metres at its highest jagged edge.

Inside the column, four floors of rooms are arranged around a central spiral staircase lit from above by a skylight.

An underground passage connected the column's basement to the kitchens in the outbuildings so food could be brought in unseen.

Monville's Chinese House is considered one of the first genuinely Chinese-style houses in Europe; it finally collapsed in the early 1970s.

The pyramid ice house holds a barrel-shaped pit about six metres deep, used to store ice and food.

The ruined Gothic church is not a fake: it is the real 13th-century parish chapel, abandoned in the early 16th century.

The Tartar tent, a striped metal pavilion standing on the 'Island of Happiness', was reconstructed in 1989.

Monville was an accomplished harpist and composer as well as a gardener, and ordered several thousand plants from the royal nurseries in 1777.

James Ivory filmed scenes of Jefferson in Paris here in 1994, and Abel Gance shot his comedy Au Secours! in the garden in 1923.

Twentieth-century admirers included Colette, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jimmy Carter, François Mitterrand and the architect I. M. Pei.

Why it is worth it

A house built inside the stump of a broken column of impossible size is the image that has drawn painters, surrealists and presidents to the Désert de Retz. The "Colonne détruite" stands as if it were the last fragment of a colossal ruined temple, yet it was built as a house, and its owner made it his main residence. It is the centrepiece of one of the most extraordinary gardens of late 18th-century France, laid out on the northern edge of the Forest of Marly, in the commune of Chambourcy west of Paris.

The garden was the creation of François Racine de Monville, a wealthy aristocrat who bought the estate in 1774 and enlarged it over the following decade. In the fashion of the day it was an "Anglo-Chinese" landscape garden, a deliberately irregular park studded with fabriques, small buildings meant to evoke distant times and places. Some twenty were built: a Chinese House of wood (1777–78) where Monville first lived, an ice house in the form of a pyramid (1781), a Temple of Pan, a ruined Gothic church, an obelisk, an open-air theatre, a Tartar tent and a rocky entrance where, in the original guidebook, satyrs with torches greet arriving guests. Monville designed much himself; a lawsuit of 1780 credits the architect François Barbier with several structures. He moved into the broken column in 1782, and in 1785 the royal geographer Georges-Louis Le Rouge published two dozen engravings of the garden.

The visitors' list is remarkable. Marie Antoinette came in 1781, followed by Gustav III of Sweden, Emperor Joseph II and the painter Hubert Robert. Thomas Jefferson visited in 1786 with Maria Cosway and was struck by the interior planning of the column. Monville sold up during the Revolution, and over the next century and a half the estate drifted towards ruin; the Chinese House rotted away. Its decay became a rallying point: the garden was listed as a historic monument in 1941, and in 1966 André Malraux cited it in parliament when pressing for a law that obliged owners to save neglected monuments. In the 20th century the Surrealists adopted the place, with visits by Dalí, Aragon and Arp in 1927 and André Breton's group in 1960. Seven fabriques survive on about 17 hectares, owned since 2007 by the commune of Chambourcy.

Getting there

The Désert de Retz lies on the edge of the Forest of Marly in Chambourcy, Yvelines, about 5 km from the town of Poissy, west of Paris. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 31 km away.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

The Désert de Retz is a garden on the edge of the forêt de Marly in the commune of Chambourcy, in north-central France. It was created at the end of the 18th century by the aristocrat François Racine de Monville on his 40-hectare (99-acre) estate. The architect Boullée was involved in the creation of both Monville's town houses; it is less likely he had much do with the Désert de Retz, although Monville did, for a while, engage him as assistant to the architect Francois Barbier until 1780. Monville probably designed many of the features and structures himself, or had a strong supervisory role.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia