This place was once the stage for one of the most controversial love stories of the 20th century. The place where a king who gave up his crown tried to live like royalty. Anyway, where Charles de Gaulle mapped out the rebirth of France where on a summer day in 1997, Dodie Fed and Princess Diana walked through these rooms hours before a car crash in Paris tunnel froze them in time.
What does a house like this remember? Today we’re going inside Villa Windsor. This isn’t Buckingham Palace. It’s not Versailles. It’s smaller, more intimate. 14 rooms, three floors, wrapped in trees at the edge of the boy bon, the Paris equivalent of Central Park. It’s also a house with other ghosts. So, let’s ring the bell. Back in the late 1920s, a businessman and politician named Henri Leilas commissioned this house.
Architect Charles Louie Roger Bouvard drew the plans. The city wanted something grand but not vulgar. Stylish but hidden. So he tucked this limestone mansion into 2 acres of garden just off the edge of the 16th Arondisimo behind high walls and tall trees. It wasn’t called Villa Windsor then. It was Chateau Lois, a smart, private, very French kind of luxury.
Today, workers and architects walk through the same gates with hard hats and folders. The Monsar Foundation, a French heritage organization, is restoring the villa. Their plan to open it as a museum, part of a little historical route linking three centuries of French architecture, an 18th century pleasure house at Bagatelli, a 19th century pavilion, and this 20th century stage for royal exile.
We hope the villa will open its doors this year, but you can get an early look. We’ll step through the front door into the entrance hall. The first impression is height. The hall is two stories tall with a sweeping staircase and an ornate rot iron ballastrod that curves like jewelry and metal. Light filters down from high windows.
It’s designed to make you feel like you’ve stepped into a little private universe. But the first famous family to really live here wasn’t royal. In August 1944, Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation. A few days later, General Charles de Gaulle, the tall, severe leader of free France, moved in with his family.
The city furnished the villa in just 4 days. His office is on the ground floor. Political meetings happened behind these walls. ministers, party leaders, ambassadors, people trying to stitch a country back together. He paced these floors, planning not an empire, but a republic. It only lasted 2 years. And then in January 1946, even in this tense place, there’s a wedding.
De Gaul’s daughter, Elizabeth, marries Count Alande Bisau. By 1946, the de Gauls moved out. The house goes quiet again. But the villa story isn’t finished. Its next chapter belongs to a king who walked away from his crown. You probably know the short version. In 1936, Edward VIII gave up the British throne to marry the woman he loved, a twice divorced American.
I discharged my last duty as king and emperor. He becomes the Duke of Windsor. She becomes Wallace, Duchess of Windsor. The monarchy survives. The couple is exiled from the center of royal life, but never from its shadow. A decade later, after the war, that exile would bring them here, giving the villa a new and very different role in history.
And for years, people have argued about it as if it happened yesterday. Was it true love, obsession, or weakness? Whatever the motive, the consequence was permanent. He gave up the throne. His brother became King George V 6th and eventually George V 6th’s daughter became Queen Elizabeth II. The crown moved on.
For years after the abdication, the Windsors lived like a pair of very glamorous nomads, villas on the Riviera, apartments in Paris, suites and hotels. Each one was decorated and redecorated by Wallace with the help of some of the most fashionable decorators of the 20th century. By the early 1950s, they wanted something more permanent.
Paris offers them this house on the edge of the boy debon, which the city owns. The rent, a peppercorn sum, a token amount, sometimes described as around £25 a year. On the understanding that the former king and his wife will bring a certain prestige, they accept. In 1953, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor move in.
Wallace decided to redecorate it with Stfan Budon of Mason Jansen, the chic Paris decorator who would later quietly help Jacqueline Kennedy with the White House and oversaw the interiors. His style here has been described as a recreation in the 1950s of a 1930s ideal. A cocktail of Louis X 15th curves, mirrored surfaces, and sharp color choices.
We can describe their home life in Paris as meticulously curated rooms with Trumpoy effects, ornate paneling, sheen wisery, a sort of aristocratic theater. And the rooms at Villa Windsor were designed to impress. There was one color that binds it all. Blue. Not just any blue, [snorts] her blue.
Wallace blue to match her eyes and echo her 1937 wedding dress. The walls glow in shades of blue. Ceruan silver blue pale sapphire antique 18th century wood paneling painted with shininoisery landscapes wraps the room like a jewel box. One photographer who captured the house in the 1960s wrote that it was hard to imagine any interior cleaner or more luminous.
It was in this environment that the Windsor hosted their famous dinner parties. the likes of Marlena Dietrich, Aristotle Anassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Aakhan. Once Villa Windsor’s future resident Alid was invited. He later told the New York Times in 1986 that he remembered the way they danced and their sense of fun. In the grand salon, the blue softens a little.
pale walls, 18th century paneling taken from an old chateau, guilt sofas, and low tables scattered with little objects, picture frames, cigarette cases, porcelain animals. Pugs are everywhere. Not just the real ones snuffling around the carpets, but porcelain pugs, embroidered pugs on cushions, pug prints and frames. The Windsor loved these small, slightly comical dogs and surrounded themselves with their images as if they were talismans.
In the library, the mood changes. Dark wood shelves, books on military history, politics, and sports. Portraits of the couple by serious British painters. The Duchess captured in a blue silk dress with her famous bouquet of flowers brooch. The Duke looked slightly wistful and proud. This is where the former king reads about wars he once inspected as Prince of Wales and about a world that moved on without him.
Can you imagine sitting there reading the newspaper knowing that somewhere else your niece is wearing the crown that would have been yours? On the second floor, a more private world. To one side, Wallace’s domain. Her dressing room is lined with cupboards. One is said to have been filled from floor to ceiling with shoes, pumps, sandals, evening slippers, all coated to outfits.
Beyond is her bedroom, a soft but dramatic blue with silk mwa walls. Her bathroom is clad in marble and decorated with painted panels. On the other side, his rooms are simpler. The Duke’s bedroom had a deeply personal detail, 25 photos of Wallace. He jokingly called it his Wallace collection.
Nearby are two small budois. Later, these would be turned into medical rooms. It’s in these upstairs spaces that the story tilts from glamour to something much heavier. It’s the early 1970s. The parties are rarer. The pugs move more slowly on the stairs. The Duke of Windsor is seriously ill with throat cancer.
Upstairs, his rooms become a private clinic. The budoir’s once intimate retreats hold medical equipment. Then in 1972, a visitor from the world he left behind arrives. It was, they emphasized, a purely social visit. The queen would be at Longorn Racecourse, very near the Duke’s home, and would like to see her uncle and his wife, especially as it was known for some time that [screaming] he was not very well.
Queen Elizabeth II visits the Duke of Windsor, accompanied by Prince Philip and Prince Charles. She visits him in this house upstairs in those faded blue rooms. He asks whether Wallace might finally be allowed to use the style her royal highness. She refuses. He dies here shortly after that visit. We don’t know every word they said.
We do know that after all the drama of 1936, the final conversation took place not in a palace, but in this villa on the edge of Paris. After his death, Wallace stays for 14 more years. She lives in this house, increasingly reclusive. Friends drift away. Health declines. Dementia creeps in. She died in 1986. The house is quiet again.
The clothes hang in the closets. The pugs are gone. Blue silk fades in the sunlight. And the city of Paris gets its property back. Because the next chapter arrives with money and ambition. Cut back to the 1980s. Muhammad Al Fied, an Egyptian-born businessman, enters the picture. Owner of Herods in London and the Ritz in Paris.
A man obsessed in his own way with the idea of royal approval. The city of Paris offers him a deal, a long lease on the villa in exchange for a serious restoration. He signs a 50-year lease at about 1 million francs a year and commits to spending tens of millions of francs on refurbishing the house.
Over roughly 3 years and around $14.4 million in work, he brings the villa and its surrounding gardens back to their former glory. He hires Sydney Johnson, the Duke’s former valet. Johnson teaches Alfa how things once stood, what went where, and how the Windsor lived. Together with decorators and craftsmen, they recreate the Windsor style.
Alfa buys up furniture, art, and objects for the equivalent of $4.5 million from the principal beneficiary of the Duchess’s estate, the Pasture Institute. He calls the house Villa Windsor officially. The first two floors become a private museum of sorts, not for tour buses, for historians, members of the British royal family, personalities, friends, and important guests of the Ritz, as he puts it.
The third floor is turned into a family apartment for his own use. Now we jump to the 1990s. The house is fully restored. The blue rooms shine again. Alfa has turned the villa into a private shrine to the Windsor’s love story and in a way his own fascination with royalty. He entertains guests here, shows them the abdication table, the portraits, the pugs, and then another couple steps into the story.
Dodie Fed and Diana, Princess of Wales. In late August 1997, Dodie brought Diana here. Accounts differ on exactly how long they stayed or precisely what was said, but we know this. They visited Villa Windsor just before their final car ride through Paris. Some later claimed they were discussing the idea of setting up home here, making this villa another stage for another scandalous royal relationship.
There was a rumor that they were considering it as a possible residence, a place away from the London tabloids. We don’t know for sure. What we do know is that this house, already full of royal heartbreak, watched another royal story brush past and then disappear overnight. If you stand there today, it’s hard not to feel that echo.
A dethroned king, a controversial duchess, a princess who never made it to 40, all linked by one house. In July 1997, Alfa announced that an auction of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s possessions from the villa would take place later that year in New York. The items to be offered for sale had personal value to the British royal family and included the desk on which Edward VIII abdicated in 1936.
A collection of some 10,000 photographs and a doll given to Edward by his mother, Queen Mary. Following the deaths of Alfaed’s son, Dodie and Diana, Princess of Wales, the auction was postponed, but it eventually took place in February 1998 at Sabes, New York with more than 40,000 items for sale. Members of the British royal family were believed to have purchased all but a tiny handful of the items in the sale, though officially they remained anonymous.
The auction raises around $23 million for the Dodie Fied International Charitable Foundation and other causes. For a while, the Villa Windsor exists in a kind of limbo. Alied still has his lease. Parts of the house are used by his family, but the magic of the full Windsor recreation is gone. The blue rooms stand faded.
Then in the 2020s, the next chapter begins. The city of Paris chose the Monsart Foundation to take over the villa and two nearby historic buildings. Their mission, restore, research, and eventually open Villa Windsor to the public. They pour over old photographs, estate records, letters, and memoirs. They talk to people who work here.
They bring in architects and conservators. Soon, if the restoration stays on schedule, these rooms will open to the public as part of a new museum route in Paris. You’ll be able to walk up that staircase yourself. Stand in the salon where the Windsor met for their evening cocktails. Look out at the trees that hid their parties from the world and decide what you think about them.
Not from tabloids or TV dramas, but in the space where they actually lived. If stories like this fascinate you, stick around. We’ve got more. Hit subscribe, ring the bell, and maybe share this with someone who still thinks royal life is just tiaras and balcony waves.
