Domaine de Villarceaux

The Villarceaux estate, in the Val-d'Oise, is a major historic site of the Île-de-France, revealed and hidden in turn by an elaborate play of gardens, terraces and water. It is unique in its size and variety.

It includes an old château, the Château du Bas, whose charm lies in a certain diversity and whose building history is unknown, as no written record seems to survive; it is still called the 'Manoir de Ninon'. The Château du Haut, by contrast, was built in a single campaign in the mid-18th century and impresses with its sobriety and its sense of strength and beauty. Finally there is a vast territory with, in a hollow, a Renaissance garden fed by many springs (32, it is said) lined with ornamental pools and ponds, and a cutting through the hillside wood aligned on the Château du Haut, within a 63-hectare park in an estate of 815 hectares in the heart of the French Vexin.

The walled park and its buildings were listed as historic monuments in 1941. Since 1989 the Île-de-France region has carried out a major restoration programme under a 99-year lease with the Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer, led by Pierre-André Lablaude, chief architect of historic monuments.

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