Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

Born in Paris to the architect Alexandre Émile Auburtin, Jacques-Marcel Auburtin graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in 1896. He worked on a number of municipal buildings in Paris, including La nouvelle Sorbonne (with Henri-Paul Nénot, 1896–1899), Colisee Gaumont (1912), and the Salle Pleyel (with André Granet and Jean-Baptiste Mathon, 1927). Auburtin was a founding member of the Société française des urbanistes and theorized how to rebuild France after World War I in a novel 1915 treatise that proposed indoor plumbing and sewage, electricity, and other innovations. His brother, Jean-Francis Auburtin (1866–1930), was a landscape painter.

Born in Nice to a family in the textile business, Aaron Messiah began an architectural apprenticeship at the age of fourteen after his family suffered financial losses. In his twenties, he designed buildings for Protestant churches in Nice, going on to work for several powerful clients, including, notably, King Leopold II of Belgium. The neoclassical Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, designed for the Baroness Charlotte Béatrice de Rothschild, remains Messiah’s most famous work. Located in Cap Ferrat in southern France, the building, surrounded by gardens, has a loggia with a view of the sea on all sides, meant to resemble the bridge of a ship, a design reportedly inspired by the baroness’s fond memories of an ocean voyage.