House · Louveciennes

Anaïs Nin's House at Louveciennes

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowA private home

The house stands behind its high wall and remains a private residence; it is not open to visitors.

The old walled house west of Paris where Anaïs Nin lived from 1929 to 1936 and began the diary's most famous years — the room where Henry Miller, June Miller, and Antonin Artaud walk into its pages.

Address: 2 bis Rue de Montbuisson, 78430 Louveciennes
Years: 1929–1936

Illustration The Louveciennes house in color — salmon-pink walls, green shutters, vines climbing around the wooden door, lawn and cobbles in the courtyard.

The house in color — salmon walls and green shutters behind the courtyard.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

In 1929 Anaïs Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler took an old house at 2 bis rue de Montbuisson in Louveciennes, a hillside village above the Seine about seventeen kilometers west of Paris, near the park of Marly. Nin claimed the house was two hundred years old and wrote that she chose it because it seemed to have grown out of the earth like a tree. Behind its high street wall and its garden she arranged the rooms in her own key — and began the period her published diary opens on.

The house's place in literary history dates from the winter of 1931, when Henry Miller first came to dinner. Louveciennes became the second pole of Miller's Paris decade: the table where he argued out the drafts of Tropic of Cancer, the retreat from the city that fed him, and the setting where Nin met June Miller — the encounter that electrifies the first published diary volume. Antonin Artaud, Nin's father, and the psychoanalyst Otto Rank all pass through the same gate in those pages. The village outside the wall makes its own appearances: Nin walking the forest road, the train from Saint-Lazare, the lights of Paris visible from the hill at night.

Nin left the house in 1936, and the diary's center of gravity moved to Paris and then to America. The house remains private, glimpsed from the narrow street over its wall — the terresdecrivains guides and the Nin foundation's preservation campaign keep its literary address on the record, and readers of the diary still walk up from the station to look at the gate.

Key facts

Lived here: Anaïs Nin with Hugh Guiler, 1929–1936
The address: 2 bis rue de Montbuisson, Louveciennes — behind a high wall
The moment: Winter 1931: Henry Miller comes to dinner, and the diary's most famous years begin
In print: The opening setting of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934
On the wall: A plaque beside the gate: "Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), romancière américaine, vécut dans cette maison de 1931 à 1935" — a shorter tenancy than the diary and her biographers record
Today: A private residence; visible only from the street

Documentary photographs

Archival and present-day photographs, reproduced with rights verified.

The green gates and street wall of 2 bis rue de Montbuisson in Louveciennes, the house where Anaïs Nin lived, with the commemorative plaque beside the pedestrian door — 2 bis rue de Montbuisson, Louveciennes, in 2019. The pale green carriage gates open on the house Anaïs Nin rented west of Paris; the commemorative plaque is fixed to the wall beside the smaller door, next to the number.2019 · Wolrfam, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Stone plaque on a wall in Louveciennes reading Anaïs Nin 1903-1977, romancière américaine, vécut dans cette maison de 1931 à 1935 — The plaque on the wall at 2 bis rue de Montbuisson: "Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), romancière américaine, vécut dans cette maison de 1931 à 1935" — American novelist, lived in this house from 1931 to 1935.2022 · GFreihalter, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of Anaïs Nin's house at Louveciennes — a shuttered three-storey house with dormers behind a cobbled courtyard, vines around the door, olive trees at left. — The house behind its courtyard — shutters, vines, and the olive trees.Editorial illustration

The Louveciennes house in color — salmon-pink walls, green shutters, vines climbing around the wooden door, lawn and cobbles in the courtyard. — The house in color — salmon walls and green shutters behind the courtyard.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1929
Nin and Hugh Guiler move into the house at 2 bis rue de Montbuisson.
1931
Henry Miller comes to Louveciennes for the first time; the published diary opens on this period.
1931
June Miller visits; the diary's most magnetic figure meets its author.
1936
Nin leaves Louveciennes; the houseboat years on the Seine follow.
1966
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 publishes, and the house enters literary legend.

On the map

Writers who knew this place

Anaïs Nin

French-Cuban-American · Diarist of the century — sixty years of the most famous journal in modern literature, Henry Miller's first champion, and, posthumously, the best-selling erotic writer of her age.

Lived here · 1929–1936

The walled house at 2 bis rue de Montbuisson, taken with Hugh Guiler in 1929 — the setting the published diary opens on, and the table Henry Miller first came to in 1931.

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 (1966); Sur les pas des écrivains : Anaïs Nin

Henry Miller

American · The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

Frequented by · 1931–1936

From the winter of 1931 the Louveciennes house was the second pole of Miller's Paris — dinners, arguments, and drafts of Tropic of Cancer read at Nin's table.

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 (1966); Mary V. Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller (1991)

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.