Alice de Rothschild at Villa Victoria and Waddesdon Manor
Updated: Nov 4
(This post is an update of one originally uploaded in July 2024.)
Many citizens and some visitors to Grasse will have heard of Alice de Rothschild. She built the Villa Victoria and developed its extraordinary gardens, covering some 137 hectares up the Malbosc hill. The villa was subsequently demolished and re-built as the Park-Palace Hotel (now the Palais Provencal apartment block) in the late 1920s: see my blog here. It’s a little further west from Le Grand Palais (once the Grand Hotel) along the avenue Victoria. Here’s an old postcard, written in 1913, showing it, together with approximately the same view today.
Alice first came to Grasse in 1887 as a winter visitor, staying at the Grand Hotel. She bought two plots of land nearby, including an existing house known as Villa Césarie which she had doubled in size by the simple expedient of building a second house alongside it. So her new residence, later to be named Villa Victoria, was ready for her to occupy in late 1888.
Her chosen architect, whose design made the two buildings look like an integrated whole, was Louis Bompard. Like his more prolific near-contemporary Léon le Bel, his work was both domestic and commercial. In Grasse, he designed the ‘Mon Perchoir’ house on bd Emile Zola, the Banque de France office on bd Carnot and extensions to two perfumeries, the main Fragonard building on the boulevard of the same name and the demolished Pilar Frères factory, located where the La Roque car park now stands.
Once her new villa was available, Alice embarked on a voracious buying spree to create a truly enormous garden for it. In total, up until 1908, she bought thirty different parcels of land, totalling 137 hectares in all, at a cost calculated by Christian Zerry* of 4.9m old francs or about €23m today. The list of vendors reads like a roll call of Grasse’s perfumiers, bankers and merchants, including names like Chiris, Maubert, Cresp, Luce, Hugues Ainé, Euzières, Laugier, Isnard and Pélissier.
Zerry estimates that on top of her purchases she spent €1.8m/year in today’s values on maintaining the estate and its small army of gardeners.
Jean Luce and his photographs
A Grasse banker, Jean Luce, must have known Alice well. He was the vendor of the fifth plot which she bought, and his family bank was heavily involved in raising the finance for the Foulon canal which brought water to Grasse in 1889, a project in which Alice was a substantial investor.
Jean Luce was an enthusiastic (to put it mildly) amateur photographer as well as a banker – some 15,000 of his photographic glass plates are held in the Archives of the Alpes-Maritimes in Nice. Alice seems to have been happy for him to photograph her estate, and some of his images give an idea of the grandeur of the house and gardens.
Waddesdon Manor
What locals and visitors often do not know is that the Villa Victoria was, for over twenty years, just Alice’s winter vacation ‘cottage’. Her main residence, following the death of her brother Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1898 when she inherited it, was the huge mock-chateau pile of Waddesdon Manor:
This house, near Aylesbury, about 50 miles north west of central London, is set in an estate of over 1,000 hectares. Alice lived there, in her town house at 142 Piccadilly in central London and at Villa Victoria until her own death in 1922. There is one obvious resemblance between the two buildings - the Rothschilds seem to have been very keen on pinnacles!
Unlike the Villa Victoria, however, Waddesdon Manor, which was designed by a French architect as a pastiche of a typical Loire chateau, still exists and thrives, owned by the UK’s National Trust and managed by the Rothschild family. It is open to the public five days per week and ‘The Rothschild Story’ there includes much about Alice. You can see a re-creation of her sitting room.
Alice gave Villa Victoria its name after Queen Victoria visited it during her time in Grasse while staying at the Grand Hotel in April 1891. Famously, the Queen is said to have called Alice ‘The All-Powerful’ after she inadvertently trod on some flowers and was given a round telling-off.
At the time of Victoria’s visit, however, there was a much closer royal relationship with Waddesdon. Victoria had visited Alice at Waddesdon in 1890, but according to Jane Ridley’s Bertie, A Life of Edward VII (Vintage Books, 2013), “Bertie stayed most years during the 1880s in mid-July at Waddesdon…Waddesdon became a favourite place for the prince to entertain, effectively an alternative court. Guest lists were sent in advance ….for approval….The Rothschilds appealed all the more in the 1880s as, squeezed by agricultural depression, Bertie’s English friends no longer vied so keenly for the expensive honour of entertaining him.” But… “Waddesdon was no longer an option [after] Ferdinand de Rothschild died suddenly in 1898.” It seems that Alice, who became chatelaine of Waddesdon on her brother’s death, didn’t want any visits from the Prince of Wales!
The Tea House
The only surviving relic of the Villa Victoria is the Tea House (Pavillon de Thé), built in 1893.
Originally, it was accessed via Alice’s private 3km lane which is now variously named bd Alice de Rothschild, Chemin Coste d’Or and bd Président Kennedy.
It can be glimpsed through the trees from the Chemin de Champs de Tir behind it and at its main entrance at 7, allée Beau Site. The startlingly bright glazed blue and yellow tiles (the colours of the Rothschilds) still stand out in sunny conditions.
According to Christian Zerry, Queen Victoria visited Alice to see the Tea House in 1895 when she was staying at Cimiez in Nice.
The Dairy at Waddesdon
What I find interesting is that Waddesdon also has a rather whimsical building some way from the main house (but at least not at the top of a hill), known as the Dairy. It was apparently built, in 1885, to house Ferdinand de Rothschild’s herd of pedigree cattle, but, as is obvious from the photograph, it was designed to be picturesque. It has recently been refurbished and modernised as an events venue.
Perhaps when Alice had the Tea House built, reputably to her own design, she had the dairy (built in 1885, before the Villa Victoria) in mind?
* See Christian Zerry. ‘Histoire d’un Quartier, Le Domaine Alice de Rothschild’ (Editions Campanile, 2014), page 45.
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