Eva Klabin House Museum, Art and house museum in Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Eva Klabin House Museum occupies a Norman-style house built in 1931 on the banks of Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, expanded in the 1960s and arranged in nine rooms named by Eva Klabin, among them the Renaissance Room, English Room, Chinese Room and Boudoir. Its roughly 2,000 pieces span almost 5,000 years, from Ancient Egypt to Impressionism, with Greco-Roman antiquities, oriental rugs, silverware and furniture.

The founder gathered this collection over five decades traveling through Europe and Asia, bringing together objects that interested her from different parts of the world. The museum itself was established in 1990 to safeguard and share this personal accumulation of artwork and artifacts for future generations.

The museum displays Egyptian pieces, Renaissance works, Asian sculptures, and Pre-Columbian objects arranged to show how different cultures expressed their creativity across time. Visitors can walk through rooms where each collection tells a story about the people who made these items and what mattered to them.

The house operates as an indoor museum, so visitors can tour the collection regardless of weather, and the rooms flow naturally from one to another making it easy to follow the layout. Plan to spend a couple of hours here, and note that photography rules and access to certain areas may have restrictions that staff can explain upon arrival.

The garden was designed by Roberto Burle Marx, whose taste for bright colours and tropical plant life is visible in the species chosen for the slope above the lagoon. The house itself was built in 1931 in Norman style, and in 1952 the Roman architect Gaetano Minnucci was commissioned to give it palatial facades and classical interiors.