Monsignor Pierre Pfister, a native of Besançon, spent his formative years in Rome, in the 1930s he was a professor at the Besançon seminary and in 1946 he returned to Rome permanently as a Lateran Canon and professor. During his years as a student in Rome, he had studied the art of the catacombs, and especially made many copies and casts of paintings, mosaics, epigraphs and sculptures he had seen in the catacombs.  

In 1945, he obtained permission from the archbishop to create a private chapel in the lower floor of his family home in Rainans. Pfister decided to celebrate his love for the Christian antiquities of Rome in this chapel: the altar was a copy of the one in the Roman church of Saints Nereus and Achilleus and the room was used to display most of his casts made in Rome. 

Furthermore, in the lower crypt he decided to reconstruct a catacomb cubicle with loculi and arcosoli, decorated with various images from the main Christian cemeteries in Rome. It recreates a typical catacomb cubicle in white-yellowish mortar and red and yellow linear decoration. To decorate the walls, he repeated the copies he made of the main paintings from the catacombs of Priscilla, Callistus, Marcellinus and Peter.