Villa Senar

Villa Senar is an estate near Hertenstein on the shore of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, built for the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who bought the land in 1932 and had the Swiss architects Alfred Mori and Karl Friedrich Krebs design a strikingly modern house there. Its name combines letters from Sergei, his wife Natalia, and their surname Rachmaninoff. The Rachmaninoffs summered at Senar until 1939, when they emigrated to the United States ahead of the Second World War, and the composer completed the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini there in 1934 and his Third Symphony in 1936, while guests included the writer Ivan Bunin and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. The canton of Lucerne bought the villa in 2022 and opened it to the public on April 1, 2023, Rachmaninoff's 150th birthday, as a cultural center.