Villa Wintrebert

In Banyuls-sur-Mer, French Catalonia, the Villa Wintrebert turns its back on passers-by and looks instead down the length of its enormously long, tropical garden. Renamed after the pioneering naturalist Paul Wintrebert, who once lived there with his wife, the villa was also aptly known as ‘Loin des Yeux’ (Out of Sight). In her speculative history of the place, its inhabitants and visitors, Penelope Curtis imagines the relationships of tenderness and passion across three generations of women, witnessed at a distance by two little girls. Harmony is disrupted when a well-intentioned commission to the renowned local sculptor, Aristide Maillol, shines a light on the fundamental fragility of the women’s relationship. Villa Wintrebert is a story of childhood, of adult complicity, and of the unfinished sculpture which fractures the female friendship on which the villa and its garden had depended.