Three centuries of history. One address.

Before there was a house, there was only land: five hectares of fields and kitchen gardens in Eaux-Vives, known as Le Domaine des Vollandes to whom it belonged. In 1712 a Huguenot cloth merchant, Pierre Faure, bought the property and raised a house of five bays where the hemp had grown. It appears on a map of Geneva drawn six years later, small and square among the gardens. In 1768 a later owner widened it by a bay, added a storey, and cut a long avenue through the fields to its door. Everything afterwards was arrivals and departures — merchants and bankers, pastors, an engineer, a State Councillor — while the city drew closer around the garden. The railway divided the estate, a fire took the interior, and still the house held.

A cedar of Lebanon stands in the courtyard, old enough to have seen most of it happen. It has outlasted the fields it shaded, the avenue that ran past it and every family who lived beneath it, and it keeps the house from the street even now, which is why so many pass the address without knowing it is there.

The restoration was entrusted to Galante Menichini, the Milanese architects, who worked with the house rather than upon it. The rooms keep their proportions and the order in which they were meant to be entered, and what is new sits among what is old without asking to be forgiven. Contemporary design and an art collection occupy walls raised for company three hundred years ago, which is, after all, what they were built to hold.