In 1774, de Monville bought a country estate at Saint-Jacques-de-Retz, which had a working farm, pasture, and woodlands, and a formal garden à la française attached to the main house. He resolved to create a French landscape garden in a style influenced by the English garden. He called the garden the Désert de Retz, planted four thousand trees from the royal greenhouses, rerouted a river, and created several ponds.[lower-alpha 1]
The Désert de Retz was completed in 1785 and contained twenty-one fabriques, or architectural constructions, representing different periods of history and parts of the world. They included an artificial rock entrance, a temple of rest, an outdoor theatre, a Chinese house, a ruined Gothic church, a ruined altar, a classical tomb, an obelisque, a temple to the god Pan, a Tatar tent, and an ice-house in the form of a pyramid. The best-known feature was the ruined classical column, which was large enough to contain enough rooms to be a working residence. However, de Monville preferred to reside in the much smaller Chinese house while at the Désert.[2]