Chateaux

Burgundy-Franche-Comté

Château de Chevigny-en-Valière

Doors from the old Russian embassy, a foyer from the Place des Victoires, marble troughs saved from a Paris store: Louis Brossard filled his château in Burgundy with the lost interiors of Haussmann's Paris. Over 35 years, this man of leisure from Beaune turned a winegrower's farm into a folly,…

Île-de-France

Château de Breteuil

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Château du Villard

Built in the late 15th century for the wedding of Delphine de Vachères and Pierre de Mathieu, viguier, or royal magistrate, of Forcalquier, Le Villard is a small four-towered château in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, sold only twice in five centuries. Turned into a farm after the Revolution and…

Grand Est

Château de Vaux

Designed in 1721 by Germain Boffrand, architect to the Duke of Lorraine, Vaux raises a Regency facade of pale Tonnerre stone in the southern Aube, crowned with carved children and unicorns. Home of Maupas, a minister of Napoleon III, it was abandoned on the eve of World War II, stripped of its…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de l’Herm

When Nicolas de Laâge de Meux bought it in 2020, the Château de l'Herm, in the Dordogne, had stood without roofs or floors for nearly two centuries. Yet this Flamboyant Gothic house, built in a single campaign in the early 16th century, had kept the heart of its beauty: its entrance, its great…

Occitania

Château de Lantis

Empty since 1787 and buried under 40,000 fallen tiles, Lantis survived two centuries because a farmer walled up its doors and windows during the Revolution. This small 17th-century military château, built between Cahors and Sarlat on the base of a 15th-century fortress, has kept its fireplaces,…

Normandy

Manoir de Coupesarte

Few residences embody half-timbered Norman architecture as well as the manoir de Coupesarte, in the heart of the pays d'Auge. Its L-shaped buildings, bristling with corbeled corner turrets, are reflected in the water-filled moat. Once a farmhouse, the manor has become a precious testament to the…

Brittany

Château de Bonaban

The last and largest of the malouinières, the country houses built by the shipowners of Saint-Malo, Bonaban went up in 1777 for the Le Fer family on a rocky spur above the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. A Carrara marble staircase and ceilings more than five meters (16 feet) high announced a fortune.…

Centre-Val de Loire

Château Poséidon

A carved sea monster carrying a boat with the face of Poseidon, at the foot of the grand staircase, gave its nickname to the Château de La Borde, long famous among urban explorers. Built between 1860 and 1865 by the architect Alfred Dauvergne, this château in central France lines up a central block…

Île-de-France

Hôtel Claude Passart

Built in 1620, during the reign of Louis XIII, the hôtel Claude Passart stands at 4 rue Chapon, in the heart of the Marais. It is sometimes called the hôtel de Jean Bart, though the famous privateer never actually lived there. Built for a financier close to the halls of power, it illustrates the…

Normandy

Château de Médavy

Built on the ruins of a medieval keep, then enlarged in the 18th century by Thiroux de Montregard, Médavy was home for three centuries to the Rouxel de Médavy family, who gave France two marshals. For some twenty years, Jean-Louis Charon and his wife have been restoring this château in the Orne, in…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de Montastruc

Montastruc, from the Latin monte astrucus, is the hill under a lucky star: a rocky spur near Bergerac, lived on since antiquity, where caves sit beside a late 13th-century Gothic château and its Louis XV wing in Bordeaux-style stone. Its 1475 roof frame and 18th-century interiors have survived…

Normandy

Château des Feugerets

Three red ferns on a coat of arms: the Feugerets family took its name from a fern that still grows on its land, and scattered the plant all over its château. A castle in the Perche, in southern Normandy, built in the late Middle Ages, reworked in the Renaissance and again under Louis XIII, made a…

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Commanderie de Celles

Neither château nor convent, but a farm run by warrior monks: the Commanderie de Celles was given to the Knights Templar in 1213 by Dalmas de Celles, then held by the Knights of Malta until the Revolution. Set 880 meters (2,890 feet) up in the Cantal, around an 11th-century Romanesque church, it…

Grand Est

Château de Dampierre

A 17th-century residence attributed to François Mansart rises behind the gatehouse of a vanished fortress. Dampierre kept its grand staircase and vaulted medieval kitchen, even after its interiors were stripped in the 1930s. Bought at auction in 2021 by Antoni Calmon, a devoted doctor, this château…

Centre-Val de Loire

Château de Culan

Few French castles still have their wooden hoardings. Culan, a fortress of the Berry high above the Arnon River, keeps them on its round tower. Remodeled around 1450 for entertaining, on the model of Jacques Coeur's palace in Bourges, it lines up three square towers, three large staircases and…

Normandy

Château de Pont Saint-Pierre

Five centuries standing, then twenty-five years of neglect nearly finished off Logempré, a small moated château built around 1490 of white Seine stone and flint, on a site long fought over by the Normans and the English. Stripped of its interiors and left without upkeep, it saw its roof frames…

Grand Est

Château de Jaulny

A thousand-year-old fortified house in Lorraine, where a stubborn tradition says Joan of Arc lived on as Jeanne des Armoises: Jaulny has overlooked the Rupt de Mad valley since the Middle Ages. The château has kept its armory, its vaulted cellars and a Gothic roof frame, reinforced after World War…

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Château de Beaufort

A modern house set down inside a ruined fortress, without touching an old wall: that was the gamble of architect Jean-Jacques Julien, who bought Beaufort when its ruins were given fifteen years to live. The stronghold, built between the 13th and 16th centuries, stands on a rocky peak in the…

Pays de la Loire

Château du Lude

A Hundred Years' War fortress turned pleasure palace by the Daillon family, Le Lude gained a Louis XVI wing and then Renaissance Revival interiors in the 19th century. It towers over the Loir valley in the Sarthe, above its terraced gardens. It is one of the last great châteaux of the Loire still…

Pays de la Loire

Château de Lassay

Lassay is nothing but towers linked by ramparts: a 15th-century fortress built to hold the borderlands of Maine against Normandy and Brittany, and handed down almost intact. Its artillery bulwark, shaped like a ship's prow and exceptionally well preserved, still guards the only entrance. Bought…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de Fénelon

François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, author of The Adventures of Telemachus, was born in 1651 in this fortified castle in the Périgord Noir, and the bed he was born in has never left it. The last Cathar refuge in the area in the 13th century, rebuilt and reshaped until the 1600s, Fénelon has…

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Château de Veauce

A cistern carved out of the rock perhaps before the year 1000, towers from the 11th to the 15th century and a 148-foot watchtower nicknamed the Mal Coiffée: Veauce is a château a thousand years old, linked by tradition to Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious. The Cadier de Veauce barons, owners from…

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Château de Charmes

A thousand years of history, from the Clermonts to Imbert de Batarnay, adviser to kings from Louis XI to Francis I, had not prepared Charmes for twenty years of neglect, squatters and looting. A medieval keep in the hills of the Drôme, in southeastern France, it became a country house in the 17th…