Inside Casa Costanza, the Swiss summer home of the Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim, handwritten notes are everywhere. Some are explanatory: A tiny scroll stuffed inside a dragon-shaped bronze ink pot informs the reader that the object once belonged to the grandfather of Oppenheim’s husband, the businessman Wolfgang La Roche. Others have a more authoritative tone: A framed letter in bold script warns houseguests that children are by no means allowed in the library unattended. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, when Oppenheim shared the place with her two younger siblings, Kristin and Burkhard Oppenheim (the latter later took his mother’s maiden name, Wenger, before the Second World War), the notes could seem “pedantic,” says Burkhard’s daughter Lisa Wenger, 76, who now lives next door and acts as the custodian of her aunt’s legacy. But four decades after Oppenheim’s death, they’re the precious ephemera of a seminal artist who refused to compromise her very specific vision.

Oppenheim was born in Berlin in 1913 and, the following year, after the outbreak of World War I, emigrated with her mother to Delémont, Switzerland. In 1932 she moved to Paris to study art and quickly established herself, alongside Hans Arp, Man Ray and Max Ernst, as an integral figure in the Surrealist movement — yet she never considered herself a Surrealist. When she returned to Switzerland in 1937, she distanced herself from the group, preferring not to give her work a label. Oppenheim — who married La Roche in 1945 and chose not to have children — often centered her practice on domestic objects, transforming them into wry comments on the nature of life, sex and art. Her best-known piece, “Le Déjeuner en Fourrure” (1936), comprises a teacup, saucer and spoon swathed in the fur of a dik-dik, a small African gazelle. “Ma Gouvernante-My Nurse-Mein Kindermädchen,” which she made the same year, is an assemblage of white high-heeled pumps trussed like a roast chicken and served on a silver platter. While her artistic output could be sporadic — particularly during a 17-year depressive episode, which began around 1937 — Casa Costanza, the family summer home, remained a constant throughout her life. She spent at least a month there every year, walking in the area’s wooded hills, hosting friends and working in a small, sparsely decorated studio overlooking the rear garden.

Located in the hilltop town of Carona, a medieval hamlet above Lake Lugano, near Switzerland’s southern border, the three-story, approximately 4,800-square-foot villa was constructed in the 18th century by the Solari family, a dynasty of architects who worked on Milano’s Duomo cathedral. Oppenheim’s maternal grandparents — who founded the Wenger Swiss army knife company, now owned by Victorinox — bought the place in 1917. Situated in the town’s cobblestoned central square, it features a flat, buttery yellow plaster facade painted with trompe l’oeil fresco window casings and cameo portraits. In 1966, after her parents died, Oppenheim renovated the property with the help of the Lugano-based architect Aurelio Galfetti, who was known for fusing regional traditionalism with Modernist ideals. They enlarged the kitchen vertically by removing an entire floor and cut wide windows into the thick stone walls to let in light. Decorative tiles were pulled up in the sitting room to reveal the original concrete floor and the orange and blue walls were painted a clean, crisp white. “It was her dream to leave her mark on the house,” says Wenger, and the residence became a manifestation of Oppenheim’s practice — a place where she could reimagine her concept of home.

In the entryway, a red and green cauldron of papier-mâché crocodiles made in 1965 by the Swiss artist Peter von Wattenwyl greets visitors. At the flip of a switch, the reptiles gyrate to a tinny recording of an Indonesian folk song. Up a short flight of stone stairs is an expansive L-shaped sitting room, with a Rococo-style marble fireplace topped with the original owners’ family crest, elaborate stucco plasterwork that curls around the doorway and a keyhole-shaped arch that divides the space. Along the upper walls, there’s a mid-18th-century painted banner depicting winged cherubs riding sea monsters. Oppenheim made much of the furniture herself, including the wood coffee table with a round slab of green and red onyx embedded in its center (“No cups or bottles on the stone!” warns another note) and the gold-leaf-covered wooden chandelier, with arms twisted like olive branches. She also fashioned sconces from nautilus shells and created a fan-like table lamp out of tortoiseshell, the materials having been provided by her sister Kristin’s brother-in-law, an anthropologist, following a trip he took to the tropics.

On one side of the room, a built-in glass case holds other mementos, including porcupine quills from America, African tribal sculptures and a porcelain doll once owned by Oppenheim’s paternal aunt Christiane, who died aged 9. Around the corner is a 1983 edition of Oppenheim’s “Table With Bird’s Feet,” originally from 1939, which was cast in bronze and features a spindly pair of avian legs. Beside it, as if idling at a sidewalk cafe, is a sculpture by the Swiss artist Eva Aeppli of a haunting figure dressed in a flowing white cotton gown, with deep, empty eye sockets and dried pink hydrangeas for hair. Publicly, Oppenheim resisted being defined as a “female artist,” preferring what she once described as the “androgyny of the mind.” Still, “she had a lot of protégées, and they were all women,” says Wenger. Scattered throughout Casa Costanza are portraits by the Argentine-Italian Surrealist Leonora Fini, a kaleidoscope-like drawing by the Swiss esoteric healer and artist Emma Kunz and a totem-like chalk stone vessel by the Swiss sculptor Owsky Kobalt.

Much of Oppenheim’s art collection is displayed in the game room, which has red tiled floors, shelves filled with board games and children’s books and, hanging from the ceiling, Oppenheim’s “Game Without Rules” (1966), a mobile composed of clear plastic rulers. Many of the pieces were gifted by their makers: a kinetic sculpture by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely; a collage by Ernst, with whom Oppenheim had a brief but well-documented affair; and an illustrated letter from the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd. Next door is Oppenheim’s studio, a plain, white-walled space where she painted and made sculptures, often out of things found around the house. For instance, her diorama “Vanitas” (1969) includes a mummified rat her mother had found in the attic, which Oppenheim splayed across a pillow next to a small looking glass.

On the other side of the game room, a landing overlooks the double-height kitchen, where Oppenheim loved to cook for friends. Wenger remembers long evenings spent in front of the grand hearth with people chatting or playing exquisite corpse, a Surrealist-invented game in which each player blindly adds to a composite drawing or poem. The landing also leads to a small library, with hundreds of leather-bound books on philosophy, science and literature and a daybed with a blue floral block-printed canopy. The room is warm and intimate; it would have made sense for Oppenheim to sleep there, or in one of the three modern bedrooms located on an upper floor. Instead, she retired each night to a single bed in the attic, a cramped space with low ceilings and terra-cotta floors. Oppenheim was interested in the teachings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who when she got to meet him in 1935 encouraged her to record her dreams, which often included snakes and other wild animals she would then incorporate into her work. The modest room — empty save for a few items, including a wooden wardrobe, a frame of pinned butterflies and a small fireplace — shows little proof of the enormity of her creative vision. “It fit her simplicity,” says Wenger, who explains that Oppenheim sought austerity in her private life. She found it at Casa Costanza.

Producer: Matteo Lonardi