[1][page needed] Raoul Albert La Roche was born on 23 February 1889, and grew up in Basel, Switzerland in a bourgeois family, very closely linked to the world of art.

[2] In 1912, at the age of 23, La Roche moved to Paris to work for the Banque Suisse et Française (BSF), which became in 1917 the Crédit Commercial de France.

[citation needed] In 1940, during the invasion of France by the German army, he left Paris and moved to Lyon, keeping his job at the bank, until the end of the war.

[citation needed] In 1922, on the occasion of a trip to Venice and Vicenza (Italy) with Le Corbusier, La Roche planned to have a villa built by his friend.

The villa was built in joint ownership with Le Corbusier's brother, the violinist Albert Jeanneret, and housed his collections of paintings, including works by Picasso,[5] Braque,[6] Fernand Léger.