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“Everything,
even the scent of the air that one breathes there,”
Victoria Ocampo wrote about the Villa Ocampo, “is
blended through my whole life as if it were blended
through the life of those who have come before me.”
The Villa Ocampo was not merely an enclave for the
most prestigious figures of world literature and
culture, but also Victoria Ocampo’s own final
refuge. Located in the Béccar district of
San Isidro, the imposing French-Victorian style
mansion is one of the few remaining exemplars of
the late 19th century ranch-home. The house is encircled
by romantic and mythical gardens and faces the steep
banks of the Río de la Plata’s north
shore. Villa Ocampo was built according to a French
architect’s designs by Victoria’s father
Manuel Ocampo, an engineer specializing in roads
and bridges, for her great aunt Francisca Ocampo
de Ocampo.
The house, constructed on the descending terrains
of San Isidro, has exterior walls of a burnt ochre
color similar to that of Roman palaces, and four
stories each measuring 500 square meters. The main
entrance, whose approach affords brief glimpses
of the mansarded roofs through the trees, consists
of a porch and a vestibule with a marble staircase,
which are traversed to reach a central hall. This
hall is marked by a glass ceiling and gives to several
bedrooms which look out on the river. A second-floor
balcony wraps around the length of the house and
offers outstanding views of the grounds. Villa Ocampo
was built without central heating because the family
believed they would use the home during the summer
only. The writer Alain Robbe-Grillet must have intuited
this detail when, confronting the immense hall he
murmured: “This reminds me of Marienbad”
(not long before the film Last year at Marienbad
had been released, based on Robbe-Grillet’s
adaptation). Victoria’s reply was indignant:
“Could anyone have come up with a more contrasting
atmosphere? But Marienbad is indeed a freezer!”
And she was right, since not even the iciest breath
of winter could strip the house of its warm ambience
filled with books and paintings and flowers.
When Victoria inherited the Villa Ocampo she decided
to redecorate the house with a modernist pitch:
she painted the walls white to reflect natural light
but left the exterior intact, achieving a certain
simplicity inside the Victorian edifice. On the
front façade is printed the name of the house,
and on the back one is the year of its completion.
Victoria willed Villa Ocampo to UNESCO in 1973,
six years before her death. Since 1997, the house
has been a declared historic monument.
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