Villa Stein-de-Monzie "Les Terrasses"

It was at the 1925 Exposition des arts décoratifs that the collector Michael Stein, Gertrude Stein's brother, and his wife Sarah came across Le Corbusier's work. They commissioned a villa at Garches, on land now part of Vaucresson, which they planned to share with their friend Gabrielle de Monzie, who owned the plot. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret started on it in the spring of 1926; the plans were settled in the summer of 1927 and the house was delivered in 1928.

The Steins went back to the United States in 1935. The villa then passed to a banker named Steen; a further sale came in 1957, and afterwards the house was split into five apartments. Listed as a historic monument in 1975, it was classified by the order of 30 March 2017, which covers the facades and roofs of the villa and of the former caretaker's lodge, the former service staircase, the former boundary gate, and the plot with its garden.

The building is a block of rendered reinforced concrete lifted on pilotis, its facades drawn by Le Corbusier according to his regulating lines (tracé régulateur). On the entrance side the facade looks symmetrical: strip windows run across it, a canopy tops the main door and a balcony the service door. On the garden side the strip windows return, with a wide bay added on the left.

The interiors, heavily reworked at the end of the 1950s, originally had no load-bearing walls and played on open surfaces and curved partitions, which gave an impression of volume and divided the spaces in an unusual way. The ground floor gathered the garage, the services and the hall, from which two staircases rose. Above came the living rooms (lounge, kitchen, dining room) and a covered terrace tied to the garden by an outside stair. The bedroom floor was the only one where the spaces were truly separated, on either side of the bathrooms and boudoirs. At the very top lay the broad terraces that gave the villa its name. To display the collection, niches and built-in cupboards freed stretches of wall for hanging pictures.

The garden is also Le Corbusier's work: he had several hundred trees and shrubs of various kinds planted there, among them privet, laurel, roses, poplars, pines and fruit trees. At the gate of the estate, the caretaker's lodge marks the way in to the house.

Private house, divided into apartments.