In 1929, Princess Winnaretta de Polignac acquired a villa near Paris. She set about transforming the villa, once built for painter Charles Chaplin and seriously damaged during the Great War, into a modern resort.

Born Winnaretta Singer, this American heiress to the Singer industrial fortune (manufacturer of sewing machines) married Prince Edmond de Polignac, a music composer thirty years her senior, in 1893, leaving her a widow in 1901.

From that time onwards, the Princesse de Polignac, who held salons with her husband, entertaining Claude Monet and Marcel Proust among others, devoted part of her fortune to patronizing the arts, sciences and literature. Passionate about music, she commissioned modern composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc to perform their works in her salon. She was also a patron of the Ballets Russes, the Paris Opera, Arthur Rubinstein, Nadia Boulanger and Vladimir Horowitz.

A friend of the writer Colette, she entertained Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev and many of the intelligentsia of her time.