“The only house we ever truly know, intimately and corner-by-corner, is the house in which we grow up,” Victoria Ocampo writes in 1934 in Sur. She had been raised amid the fusion of antique, Victorian, and modern furnishings that adorned the interior of the Villa Ocampo, and which lent the house an air of classical elegance.
Notable among these treasures are two 18th century Chinese wardrobes with bronze lacquer and finishings, acquired at the Parisian house of Mme. One of the rooms facing the garden holds a mythic Steinway piano made of mahogany and at which Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Ansermet, Federico García Lorca, Arthur Rubinstein and Jane Bathori all sat down to play at various times.

All of these furnishings reveal the taste of a woman who managed to reconcile the ethos of the 19th century with that of the 20th, in a manner that skirted any aesthetic clash and placed itself above the passage of time, so that this medley of cultures achieved a potency that neither European nor Argentine culture could attain on its own.