The Grand Châlet in Rossinière is an unfathomably large building made of wood, presumably the largest wooden house ever to have been built in the European Alps. It is where the painter Balthus spent the last decades of his life. The film is about this extraordinary house and the remarkable cosmos which the painter created in the chalet, consisting of approximately 60 rooms. In the course of the film, the boundaries between physical reality and Balthus' works of art become noticeably indistinct, thereby ultimately telling the story of visions of progress and a lost past.