Le Manoir de Ban

Birth of a Paradise

Why couldn’t there be oases in time as well as in space? Above Vevey, a little town snuggled up on the Lake Geneva shore, a plateau rises amid vineyards. Farmers and lords occupied it before a colonial-style house was built there around 1840. That residence was successively home to a prominent citizen from St. Gallen and his family, an unmarried man of private means, a master watchmaker, an industrialist and playwright, an American diplomat, and the greatest film-maker of all time: Charlie Chaplin. All of them were captivated by  the magic of the property looking out on one of the world’s most beautiful panoramas. On the site of this unique belvedere, they discovered an earthly paradise. From this point on, it is up to the reader, through these pages, to roam every nook and corner of the place, to discover the history and populate it with his or her dreams, as have thousands of people who have come from all over the world to visit the Manoir de Ban or Chaplin’s World.

Bilingual book French-English