Joachim Carvallo and Ann Coleman

In the early 20th century, Dr Joachim Carvallo and his wife Ann Coleman, heir to an American iron and steel empire, purchased Villandry. Leaving behind the laboratories of the Paris Faculty of Medicine where, a favourite disciple of Charles Richet (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1913), he was conducting advanced research into the physiology of digestion, Carvallo put all his energies and fortune into restoring Villandry to its former glory.