A tiny palace has housed ASP's upper school since 1959, two years after ASP bought and repaired it. Though it is in the future to be the administration building, attending school here has been some experience.
DuBarry, as it stands today, is an elaborate reconstruction of the hunting lodge built by King Louis XV's favorite, Madame DuBarry. She had it built about 1770 as a hideaway from her chateau (halfway down rue de la Machine, on the same side) which was part of a royal grant that included present-day Marly, Bougival, le Vesinet, la Celle and Louveciennes. When the unlucky woman was guillotined in 1793, during the Revolution, the estate was pillaged, and the lodge fell into long disrepair after being sold off by the State. It is interesting to note that four tapestries commissioned by Madame DuBarry from Fragonard "went out of style" at that time. They now hang as treasures in the Frick Museum, New York.
It was perfume tycoon Francois Coty who lavished a fortune on recreating the classical lodge in the early 1930's. He ordered the original plans by Le Doux to be followed, with a third floor added for five bedrooms, plus vast subcellars for an electrical generator, waterwells, a heating plant (big enough for a small town), kitchens (with a stove adequate for roasting deer), and a swimming pool (now serving as our art room). Coty's plans for creating a palatial estate of Madame DuBarry's discreet lodge were not fully realized before his death (rumored a rifle suicide in the carriage house recently demolished for our future elementary school). Also, relatives had sought an injunction against further spending on such luxuries as half an acre of tropical greenhouses serviced by labyrinthine passages (for perfume experiments), and a squadron of estate guards.
During the war, Coty's uncompleted Shangri-La (which he had the Ministere des Beaux Arts declare a :site Historique"), served as Paris sub-headquarters for the German Command. Then from 1939 it stood untenanted, and suffered damage when a munitions barge exploded in the Seine below.
When the American School of Paris bought the estate for about $250,000, it got an historic monument that serves as an excellent setting for what is a valuable and very lively educational institution.
[Ed. note: The restored property was recently on the market for a rumored FF 150,000,000 (and that's not ancien francs..) ]