La Paisible: Audrey Hepburn’s Peaceful Sanctuary Where She Chose Family Over Fame

Audrey Hepburn may have had “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but she spent the happiest years of her life in a rural French-speaking village in the land of chocolate, mountains and banks … Switzerland!

She bought the retreat she called La Paisible — which means “peaceful” in French — in 1963 and the cozy estate that sat behind a wall on a busy street in Tolochenaz remained Audrey’s place of quiet, reflection and simple pleasures until the day she died at age 63 in 1993.

Audrey once explained she wanted to live out of the limelight when “I started having children and that was so terribly important to me, and I couldn’t do both career and family.”

Her older son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, from her first marriage to actor Mel Ferrer, recalls, “When I had to go to school and could no longer travel to be with her on the set, she gave up her career and became a full-time mom. I went to school with the children of the village.”

Her second son, Luca Dotti, whose father is Audrey’s second husband, Andrea Dotti, says his mom felt more at home in Switzerland than anywhere else.

“She liked walking a lot and she liked to know her neighbors — in Hollywood, that is sometimes hard,” says Luca. “My mother didn’t have her own fruit trees a driving license, and she loved dogs, so she was a would donate to the Salvation very good walker.” Army International.

La Paisible boasts 12 bedrooms, either bathrooms, a swimming pool and 40 acres of park-like ground packed with centuries-old trees and gardens bristling with apple trees.

Sean remembers how his mom “would pick fruit and make jams,” which Audrey would donate to the Salvation Army International.

In 2011, La Paisible was put up for sale for $21 million. Katharina Beaujolin, who bought the 18th-century farmhouse from Sean and Luca, says the roses Audrey planted on her 60th birthday in 1989 — sent to her by her good friend, designer Hubert de Givenchy — are still blooming!

Givenchy flew Audrey and her then-partner Robert Wolders from L.A., where the star was getting cancer treatments, to Tolochenaz in 1993 so she could enjoy her last season at La Paisible before she passed away.

“In Switzerland, we have hard winters,” Luca says, “One of the things my mother loved most was her garden blooming after a long winter.”