Chalet Tournesol
Idyllwild · The Desert · Photo & Film, Events
Valerie von Sobel’s garden chalet in the Idyllwild pines.
Chalet Tournesol is the private garden estate of artist and philanthropist Valerie von Sobel, set among the pines of the San Jacinto Mountains just outside Idyllwild.
The house is an A-frame chalet furnished like an old European country house, with hand-hewn beams, brick-and-oak parquet, an antique hunt-scene canvas in the entry, a wrought-iron stag chandelier above the double-height library hall, and an antler chandelier suspended over a stone fireplace.
The house
- Location
- Idyllwild · The Desert
Why Chalet Tournesol
From there, the interiors shift dramatically. A Japanese suite is composed of tatami, shoji and pale maple beneath a silk canopy. Another bedroom is wrapped wall to wall in brown toile with a painted European tile stove in the corner, while a powder room is entirely lined in pleated rose fabric.
Outside, the property continues through a series of distinct settings: a red torii gate, an arched footbridge hung with paper lanterns, enormous granite boulders and a woven tea bower. At the end of a flagstone path stands a tiny white chapel with a steeple, built by von Sobel as a re-creation of an Austrian chapel she visited many years ago.
Chalet Tournesol offers multiple visual worlds within a single property—European alpine, Japanese, romantic and woodland—and almost none of it reads as Southern California.
Chalet Tournesol in the Journal
Inside Chalet Tournesol, Valerie von Sobel’s World Within a WorldStep inside an artist’s garden estate in Idyllwild, where architecture, collecting and memory meet.Read the storyChalet Tournesol