Nouvelle-Aquitaine

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…

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…

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…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de Puymartin

Never sold since it was rebuilt around 1450, at the end of the Hundred Years' War, Puymartin raises its storybook towers in the Périgord Noir, a few kilometers from Sarlat. This Dordogne château keeps a mythological cabinet painted in 1679, one of the few in France, 17th-century tapestries and the…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de Fayolle

Nothing has moved at Fayolle since the last marquis left: ashes in the fireplaces, linens tied and labeled, spare rolls of wallpaper, a private theater from Napoleon's Consulate. Built in 1766 on medieval foundations by Nicolas II de Fayolle, this Dordogne château stayed for more than two centuries…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de La Rochefoucauld

With its stacked galleries and great spiral staircase, traditionally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, La Rochefoucauld looks like a piece of the Loire Valley set down in the Charente. In the 16th century, François II de La Rochefoucauld, Francis I's comrade at Pavia, and his wife Anne de Polignac…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de Losse

Losse has been reborn twice. Around 1570, Jean II de Losse, captain of the Scots Guard and governor of Périgord, turned a stronghold on the Vézère River into a pleasure house. In the 20th century, Guy and Jacqueline Van der Schueren found it smothered in ivy and gave it back its splendor. Behind…

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Château de Bonneval

For nearly a thousand years, Bonneval has never left the family that bears its name, and each generation has left its mark. A Limousin fortress with two drawbridges, it was given windows and made livable around 1800 by Hippolyte de Bonneval. It was also the birthplace of Claude-Alexandre, the…