Fifteen years in the making, the Chaplin museum is entering the final stages of preparation. swissinfo.ch took a walk through a very muddy building site above the Swiss city of Vevey.


Chaplin's World, programmed to open this coming spring, aims to reinvent the museum-going experience. Set in a 14-hectare park of lush trees, it will occupy the mansion where Chaplin lived his last 25 years.

"No other museum in Switzerland will attract people from the other side of the planet," claims Yves Durand, the Canadian cultural entrepreneur who instigated the project in 2000 with his architect partner Philippe Meylan.

Durand enters the room in shirtsleeves despite the winter coolness of the makeshift offices in an offsite barn in the village of Corsier.

We are less than a kilometre away from Le Manoir de Ban, the neo-classical listed building above the village where Chaplin lived with his family. We will visit it later on, but only from the outside, as it has been stripped bare and is being entirely refurbished, including the service buildings. A large purpose-built studio, which will provide visitors with a Chaplin movie-immersion experience, is in the final stages of being fitted.

On the ground floor of the offices, Charlie's possessions are stacked high, waiting to be returned to the mansion when the refurbishment is complete.

Volumes of 'Punch and Judy' stand in endless reams of leather-bound books above the trunk that accompanied the 'Tramp' in his travels. A magnificent gilded mirror overlooks the chintzy furniture and furnishings that have yet to be renovated by craftpersons before they make their way back to the museum.

To complete Chaplin's portrait as a writer, composer and producer, the project developers have had access to his 81 films, 15,000 photos stocked at the Elysée Museum in Lausanne and 200,000 documents archived in Montreux.

These are the remnants of a surprisingly bourgeois interior fitted in the mansion by Charlie, the son of British vaudeville artists, and his wife Oona, née O'Neill, the daughter of American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature Eugene O'Neill. They would not look out of place as a stage setting for a late-19th century period piece.

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