Museo de Arte Decorativo

The Museo de Arte Decorativo occupies one of the most beautiful private residences ever built in Buenos Aires — a French Beaux-Arts palace designed by René Sergent in 1917 for the Errázuriz-Alvear family, filled with their collection of European decorative arts, and donated to the Argentine state in 1937. Walking through the museum is like visiting the home of an impossibly wealthy family at the height of Argentina's golden age, when the country's landowners lived like European royalty and furnished their houses accordingly.

The rooms are arranged as they were when the family lived here — a ballroom with a ceiling painted by Gaspar Camps, a dining room with Gobelins tapestries, a Louis XV salon with Sèvres porcelain, and bedrooms furnished with pieces that any European museum would covet. The collection includes works by El Greco, Fragonard, Corot, and Rodin, displayed not in gallery conditions but in the domestic settings for which they were originally intended. The effect is more intimate and more revealing than a conventional museum — you see how art functioned as decoration, as status symbol, and as the material fabric of daily life for people with unlimited resources.

The museum is on Avenida del Libertador in Recoleta, within walking distance of the cemetery and MALBA, and its relative obscurity (it receives a fraction of the visitors that the Recoleta Cemetery attracts) means you can often explore the rooms alone. The temporary exhibitions in the ground-floor gallery are consistently excellent, and the garden — visible through the ground-floor windows — is a formal French parterre that completes the Parisian fantasy.