Abbaye de Roseland

Abbaye de Roseland stands in Nice, surrounded by a botanical park and Italian-style gardens on the Côte d’Azur. Its eclectic architecture combines a seventeenth-century country house with medieval and Renaissance elements assembled during the 1920s. The setting also includes a large rose garden, which gives the estate its distinctive character.

Édouard Larcade, an antiques collector, reshaped the house and added historic pieces from across France. The cloister brings together parts from La Daurade monastery in Toulouse and Bonnefont Abbey, while its twenty-six columns date from the fifth and sixth centuries. Octave Godard designed the surrounding gardens between 1923 and 1927, creating an early twentieth-century landscape with a clear Italian influence.

The estate has also hosted artistic life: in 1961, Jean Larcade organised a Festival of New Realists here with artists including Arman and Yves Klein. A residential complex with more than 600 apartments later rose around the historic house, while the city of Nice received the main building and part of the gardens in 1970. Protected as a historic monument since 1996, the cloister’s ancient columns remain the place’s most striking detail.