Greatest châteaux accommodations in France
Everybody loves a very good château – and no nation does them higher than France, which is sprinkled from head to foot with castles, turreted palaces and ivy-draped mansions so befitting of a fairy story that you just half anticipate a Disney princess to waltz out of the door.
You’ll be able to admire them from afar or go on a tour. However for full immersion nothing beats staying the evening, sauntering the grounds, eating like royalty in an exquisitely chandelier-lit salon or utilizing your palatial pad as a springboard to discover the lyrical landscapes that unfurl on the doorstep. From vine-ribbed Champagne to the river-woven Loire Valley, the castle-studded Dordogne to the skyscraping French Alps, we deliver you seven of our absolute fave châteaux.
Le Château de Fontenay
Loire Valley châteaux don’t come dreamier than Le Château de Fontenay, a whimsically turreted, Seventeenth-century knockout, reclining in wooded splendor on the banks of the Cher River. Like one thing freshly minted for a romcom, this bijou fort is surrounded by immaculately landscaped lawns. The elegant rooms include a splash of interval aptitude: chandeliers, wood flooring polished to a mirrorlike sheen, ornate marble fireplaces and a good fancier visitor salon with a grand piano.
What you’ll do: When the climate warms, take a dip within the tranquil outside pool or get pleasure from breakfast – a feast of farm-fresh eggs, selfmade pastries and garden-grown fruit – on the wisteria-draped terrace. For a deeper dive, join a spin of the château’s vineyards and cellars, adopted by a wine tasting, or hop on a motorcycle to pedal alongside the banks of the river
Commercial
Make it occur: B&B doubles begin at €130 (US$152). Guide nicely forward for summer season when it’s peak château-hopping season within the Loire.
Getting there: Fly on Ryanair to Excursions airport, a 30-minute drive northwest of Le Château de Fontenay. Public transport is sparse, so that you’ll must hire a automotive or take a taxi. Alternatively, you possibly can attain Excursions in 2½ hours by prepare from Paris.
Château de l’Abbaye de Moreilles
With sensible daylight bouncing off its vine-enveloped partitions and breezes brining a whisper of the not-so-distant sea, the Château de l’Abbaye de Moreilles within the Vendée area of the Western Loire is wrapped within the romance of its origins as a Twelfth-century Cistercian abbey. There’s quite a bit to like right here: rooms stuffed with antiques and a pinch of flamboyance, with vibrant colours, patterns and luxuriant materials, a heated outside pool for floating beneath flawless blue skies, a petite spa with a scorching tub and sauna, and romps round acres of 200-year-old parkland. Dinners – courtesy of the very good cook dinner Korakot – play up freshest seasonal elements with finesse and are served by a roaring open hearth.
What you’ll do: For all its medieval vibes, the château has no airs and graces. Children are welcome and there’s tons to enchantment to households, from board video games and free bike rental to ping-pong. And once you tire (as if) of château life, it’s a straightforward day journey to La Rochelle or L’île de Ré, a reasonably island of dune-flanked seashores and massive skies.
Make it occur: Double rooms begin at €145 (US$170), and breakfast is nicely price the additional €18 (US$21) per individual. Attempt to keep away from peak summer season vacation season when airfares undergo the roof.
Getting there: The closest airport is La Rochelle, a 30-minute drive south of the château. It’s served by a number of airways, together with easyJet and Ryanair. Alternatively, it takes round 6½ hours to journey right here from the UK by prepare (Eurostar and TGV).
Château de Pâquier
The French Alps tear throughout the horizon at Château de Pâquier within the Isère, a 30-minute drive south of Grenoble. For love with out the hefty price ticket, this dinky Sixteenth-century fort enchants. This place fulfills all of the sleep-in-a-castle fantasies with its flowery gardens, vine-swaddled stone partitions, tower and a spiral staircase twisting as much as rooms with heavy beamed ceilings, antiques and views reaching deep into the valley.
Households are warmly welcome, with two rooms sleeping as much as 5. Your variety and passionate hosts, Jacques and Hélène Rossi, are very happy to whip up dinner, which they serve with their very own wines and walnut liqueur within the historic tower kitchen. And breakfast is a deal with, with selfmade bread, preserves and honey.
What you’ll do: The setting is beautiful. You’re only a hop from cliff-rimmed Lac de Monteynard-Avignonet, the place you possibly can swim or windsurf in surreally turquoise waters, and from the lushly forested, trail-woven peaks of Parc Naturel Régional du Vercors.
Make it occur: B&B doubles begin at €100 (US$117). Should you want to organize your individual meals, you’re welcome to eat within the historic, stone-walled kitchen with its huge inglenook fire. A barbecue is out there in summer season. Keep in mind that the panorama is Alpine, so winters may be chilly and snowy.
Commercial
Getting there: Château de Pâquier is a 40-minute drive south of Grenoble. From the UK, take the Eurostar/TGV to Grenoble (8 hours) or fly with an airline like easyJet (1h 45min), then rent a automotive.
Château de Bourron
Chances are you’ll be on a château excessive after a go to to the exuberantly frescoed, gilded and tapestry-slung state flats at Château de Fontainebleau, a 1900-room great thing about a palace constructed on a Versailles-like scale that was one in all Napoleon Bonaparte’s private favorites. You may get your individual shot of the royal remedy by heading 10 minutes south to remain at Château de Bourron.
Constructed on the foundations of a medieval fortress, this lavish Seventeenth-century château makes fairly an entrance with its moat, clipped hedges, prettily wooded parkland and horseshoe-shaped staircase mirroring the one at Fontainebleau. The rooms neatly match the dream invoice, too, furnished with heavy drapes, richly patterned wall coverings, interval furnishings, hand-knotted oriental rugs and Versailles parquet. Dinner is given a connoisseur twist at Les Prémices restaurant, lodged within the château’s former stables.
What you’ll do: With 100 acres of fantastically tended walled gardens to discover, it is a nice base for forest walks and bike rides. There’s additionally a tennis courtroom and children’ sandpit for the hotter months. And in the event you simply need to calm down, e book a Shiatsu therapeutic massage.
Make it occur: B&B doubles begin at €250 (US$293). The cottage rooms on the grounds are barely cheaper, with charges per evening from €185 (US$216).
Getting there: Take the Eurostar or fly to Paris. From Gare de Lyon, it’s a 1¼-hour prepare journey to Bourron-Marlotte-Grez prepare station, the place the house owners will choose you up on request.
Château d’Alteville
If the concept of slipping correctly off the radar rocks your boat, Château d’Alteville within the deeply forested, lake-spattered Moselle area in northeastern France is a fabulously rural choose. Owned by the Barthélemy household for greater than a century and now run by welcoming hosts David and Agnieszka, the vine-wisped, warm-stone, white-shuttered château is surrounded by landscaped lawns. Vintage-furnished rooms seize the romance of a extra gracious period, with high billing going to the bridal suite with its four-poster mattress.
What you’ll do: Days right here unfold in leisurely style, with fishing within the pond, birdwatching nature rambles, e-biking into the lushly inexperienced environment and scrumptious dinners that function produce grown on the natural farm. If the climate turns iffy, crack open a e book within the library or play billiards.
Make it occur: B&B doubles begin at €105 (US$123). The château is open for bookings from April to October.
Getting there: Because the château is distant, your finest wager is to take a Eurostar/TGV combo to Metz, Nancy or Strasbourg (throughout an hour away by prepare), then hire your individual wheels.
Château Les Crayères
However a cork pop away from a number of the finest champagne cellars in Reims and producing fabulous bubbly of its personal, madly romantic Château Les Crayères is fantasy stuff. You’ll pinch your self once you stroll as much as the doorway of this belle-époque stunner, with its colonnade, mansard roof and fantastically manicured grounds framed by topiaries. Up to now, so regal – and it will get higher.
Inbuilt 1904 for Louise Pommery, Duchess of Polignac, this château will make you’re feeling like royalty with its glittering chandeliers, gilt-framed oil work hanging in stuccoed salons and corridors with ruby-red padded partitions. The service is impeccably discreet, with a butler bringing you up a complimentary glass of champagne on arrival. Merci! The rooms are consistent with the palatial theme, with rococo touches, antiques, wealthy materials, marble bogs and, in some situations, Juliet balconies for gazing throughout the grounds because the solar rises.
And the icing on the five-star cake? The meals. Served with finesse on silver trays, breakfast is a feast of recent patisserie, selfmade preserves and yogurts, just-squeezed juices and eggs cooked completely to order. And the two-Michelin-star restaurant Le Parc Les Crayères walks the culinary high-wire, with chef Christophe Moret working magic on gorgeous elements in season-spun dishes like roasted scallops with salsify and chestnut praline, and head-to-toe veal with tangy chards.
What you’ll do: Get your kicks from a few of France’s most interesting champagne in Reims, the place you possibly can hook onto cellar excursions and tastings with the likes of Pommery, Veuve Clicquot and Taittinger. Reims enthralls, too, with its showstopping Gothic cathedral and UNESCO World Heritage-listed Palais du Tau (a former archbishop’s residence the place princes stayed earlier than their coronations) and Benedictine abbey-church Basilique St-Rémi.
Make it occur: Double rooms begin at €338 (US$395) in winter, however may be quadruple that in summer season. If you wish to eat at Le Parc, you should definitely reserve nicely forward. A four-course lunch/five-course dinner prices €120/270 (US$140/315) respectively.
Getting there: This is among the easiest-to-access châteaux from the UK by Eurostar. From Paris Gare de l’Est, it’s a 45-minute prepare journey to Reims. Les Crayères is a half-hour stroll or five-minute taxi journey from the station.
Château de la Ballue
A parterre sweeps as much as this baroque magnificence that is fairly presumably the fort of your wildest childhood goals. Château de la Ballue is within the petit village of Bazouges-la-Pérouse, which is a imaginative and prescient in honey stone, cobbled lanes and half-timbered homes within the Ille-et-Vilaine division of Brittany. Should you can deliver your self to depart the château, one in all France’s most iconic sights is close by: the rock-top abbey of Mont St-Michel, hovering above the ocean.
There’s lots to maintain you right here: enchanting, sculpture-strewn grounds the place you possibly can roam in quiet reverie for hours alongside the leafy avenues, cypress groves, wisteria alleys, gardens framed by clipped field, holly and yew, and a labyrinth impressed by a Le Corbusier sketch.
4 high-ceilinged, wood-paneled rooms and one suite brim with interval aptitude, such because the one dedicated to author Victor Hugo, with its cover mattress, Louis XV fire and wealthy pink damask. Simply as romantic is the Persian room, with Pierre Frey tree of life material dancing throughout the partitions and views of the topiary gardens. Breakfast, too, is a category act, served in a Seventeenth-century, chandelier-lit salon. Seasonal fruits, cheese, charcuterie, selfmade pastries, eggs and crêpes arrive on the best crockery and silver.
What you’ll do: Sneak off to the heated outside pool to swim laps, unwind on the deck with uplifting views of the Couesnon Valley, or calm down within the scorching tub and Finnish sauna. Or get a real style of la belle vie with afternoon tea served beneath the arbor within the aromatic rose backyard.
Make it occur: Doubles begin at €315 (US$368); breakfast is a further €25 (US$29). The gardens are at their blooming finest in spring and early summer season.
Getting there: The château is a 50-minute drive from Rennes airport. (EasyJet operates flights right here from London.) There’s a prepare station in Pontorson, a 20-minute drive away.
