Cheverny surprises with our best day in the Loire

It was a another delightful demonstration of serendipity in travel.

Despite research, guide books and expectations, the best outing of our Loire holiday had not featured in our plans. It included a lesser-known chateau that rejected the Renaissance template of the region, a wine appellation we'd never heard of and a restaurant we defaulted to when finding our recommended target closed. Add a fantastic gift shop filled with the work of local craftspeople and some fine dogs. Cheverny, we loved you.

Our initial objective was the wine. We were in search of good quality whites to replace the Chablis we'd laid down after a Burgundian trip five years ago, now almost finished. Loire wines are worth your attention, but their marketing needs help. We were expecting to find the kind of consolidated regional tasting room, now so common in major wine regions, where we could get a sense of different appellations and makers before heading to their vineyards to buy. Tours, the regional capital, is sadly lacking in any such facility. (The closest we could find was a shop called Les Belles Caves, good advice and regional selection, but no tasting.) Nor had we found them on our tasting days in Saumur or Bourgueil. And then, wonderfully, we discovered that the growers in Cheverny had created such a place to market their wines.

Maison des Vins de Cheverny
The shop sits just outside the entrance to the Chateau. While the agricultural building housing it is old, the interiors are modern and efficient. Buy a chip-enabled glass and help yourself to the number of tastings for which you've charged the chip. Large pillars covered with protruding spigots, labels and tasting notes offer self-service browsing and tasting for the region's reds, whites and roses. You'll also find a range of "wines of the day" on offer for free tastings, and a knowledgeable shop manager who can guide your tasting choices. A large warehouse behind the shop means you can buy anything you taste and like.

It was here we discovered the separate appellation of Cour-Cheverny, just next door but of ... to our taste ... superior quality. Evidently the locals think so, too, as little of it is exported. The whites are a single variety wine, pressed from Romoratin grapes that are only grown here. Pale yellow with fresh fruit notes, Cour-Cheverny develops honey, lemon and beeswax notes with age.

Just next door is a marvelous shop showcasing the work of craftspeople throughout the area. Jewellery, calligraphy, sculpture, corn weaving, jams and preserves, watercolours, etc. I could have spent a fortune there, but limited myself to the work of a glassblower. Three of his hand-crafted flowers now provide a sculptural element to my pond, for less than half the price of similar pieces I've seen in England.

A distinctive chateau
There are four reasons the chateau next door is unique in the Loire. Not only is it still in private
ownership, but the same family has been here since they built it (with the exception of a 22-year exile after the revolution). This makes Cheverny much more like an English stately home, with layers of change and experience building comfortably ... rather than the typical Loire chateau that's been re-created in the last century like a stage set. Second, the gracious yet imposing house is built in Louis XIII style, with an exterior of clean lines and pale neoclassicism two centuries removed from most of the Loire chateaux. It is a delight to see something different. Most visitors, however, will tell you that Cheverny's USP ("unique selling proposition") is its dogs. There's a long tradition of hunting here. I first learned of Cheverny after the British hunting-with-dogs ban, when articles cited it as a place English riders could still go for traditional sport. More than a hundred tri-coloured hounds, a cross between English fox hounds and the French poitevans, live in beautiful 19th century kennels. You can visit at any time and see them at rest in their yard, though the well-prepared will arrive in time for the 11:30 daily feeding. Finally, children who are fans of Tantin will enjoy the museum here; the chateau is the model for Marlinspike Hall, a location that features prominently in the series.

The interiors are far more lavish than the somewhat austere facade would lead you to expect. You can't totally escape those Loire renaissance traditions: there's a dining room and a weapons-draped great hall here that are 19th century interpretations of the style. Lavish rooms like the tapestry swaddled royal bedchamber hint at the opulence that presaged the revolution. Gold-gilt, geegaw-cluttered 19th century drawing rooms show off the family showing off after the restoration of the old order. And yet there are intimate spaces, too, such as a soothing family dining room with a copper-pan lined servery off one side, and a nursery cluttered with toys old and new ... including Lego versions of the hounds. Don't miss climbing to the top of the main stairs for the family chapel tucked cleverly into the summit of the house's roof line.

At the back of the chateau ... note how this side is actually a different style than the front ... there are some lovely gardens to wander in and an orangery now used as a restaurant. The wider grounds offer lawns, specimen trees and woodland. Plenty of room for a day's ramble.

Restaurant St. Hubert
If you're in the mood for a good lunch instead, you can re-direct that walk along the main road to Cour-Cheverny. In addition to being a separate wine appellation, it's also its own village, just at the end of the Cheverny estate walls. Just over a kilometer from the chateau car park, down the main road (the D102), you'll find the Logis Hotel St. Hubert. There's a car park if you don't feel like the stroll.

We were a bit hesitant when we arrived. The decor is very 1980s. With only two other tables full, and simple menus slipped into battered faux-leather covers that had seen better days, the hotel restaurant had the feel of a pokey backwater bolted on because the place needed a breakfast room. I almost expected a comedy waiter to arrive, given how Fawlty Towers it all felt.

Instead, we got an efficient and rather grim local who reprimanded us in a classically French fashion when we dared to ask about a
wine on the list from a different region of the Loire. (We couldn't help it, we'd never seen a red Menetou Salon and were curious.) Actually, I appreciate the enthusiasm. "You are in Cour-Cheverny, monsieur! Why would you drink anything from beyond?" He was right, directing us to tasty reds and whites, and he eventually warmed up as he realised how much we enjoyed both our food and wine.

Because, contrary to all expectations, this was one of the best meals of our trip. It was a triumph of classic French country cooking at its best: a hearty, chunky rabbit terrine with fresh bread; a succulent, rare sirloin of Chinon beef with creamy potatoes and roast bone marrow; the thickest tarte tatin I've ever seen, with a taste as lofty as its height. The 2014 Cheverny red we drank with the steak, from Domaine le Portail, is the "wine that got away" on this trip. The wine shop was sold out and we didn't have time to continue on to the vineyard. We will hunt for this 70% Pinot 30% Gamay back in the UK. Exactly the light yet balanced, fruity yet sophisticated red my husband was seeking to temper my predilection for smack-you-upside the head Malbecs.

St. Hubert, we learned, is the patron saint of hunters. We're delighted he directed our food and wine pursuit to his eponymous establishment.

Magnificent but monotonous, here's a guide to choosing the Loire chateaux for you

It's a tragic irony that the High Renaissance ... a period that gave us some of Europe's most outstanding art, craft and architecture ... was also a time devastated by war (both civil and between nation states), deprivation and the dangerous politics that gave Machiavelli his material for The Prince. It's something I can't help but ponder as I meander through the chateaux of the Loire.

I can't think of a more densely-packed place in the world to see so many palatial homes, all offering fairy-tale architecture and studded with fine furnishings. Their distinctive decorative features were all the latest style brought home from wars in Northern Italy. A combination of territorial claims and requests from allied city-states saw French kings active in the wars that pulled the Italian peninsula apart. After indulging in death and destruction, the French came home with booty and inspiration. Attempts to shore up alliances off the battlefield saw Catherine de Medici sent north to become Henri II's queen, bringing more Italian ideas about art, food and court. And then there were the artist refugees, like one Leonardo da Vinci, who realised France offered a safer place to live and work than their ravaged homelands.

Thus what you see in the Loire today, now considered typically French, is in reality one gigantic adoption of Italian fashion as triumphalist political statement. But that all happened back in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. How, you might wonder, is the region such a perfect time capsule of 500-year-old style?

That's the Loire chateaux's other grand irony. Pretty much everything you see has been re-created in the past 100 to 150 years. Most of these places have cycled through numerous owners, and many were stripped bare at the time of the French revolution. Others suffered damage and neglect in the World Wars. That's the reason these places all share the same fairy tale look: they've all been re-created to do so. (Unlike most English aristocratic homes, that are accretions of centuries of collection and renovation by one family, and thus tend to differ much more from house to house.)

All of which means that, unless you are particularly keen on architecture and interior design, you may find the Loire's Renaissance chateaux sinking into a boring, hard-to-remember blur by the third one you visit. White walls, black slate roofs, lots of pointy towers and twiddly bits. Inside: wood or terracotta tile floors, LOTS of tapestries, four-poster beds with tapestried hangings. Huge fireplaces with columns on either side, lots more twiddly bits and kingly logos (a salamander for Francis I, a porcupine for Louis XII) carved and painted above. At least one extraordinary cabinet with scores of little drawers and a lot of inlaid ivory. A beamed ceiling painted with heraldic symbols and more twiddly bits. Even I ... a glutton for historic interiors ... will admit that they all look very much the same.

So, if you're only going to visit two or three chateaux, how to choose? Here's my guide.

Blois - Best for History
In fact, if I were only going to visit one Renaissance chateau, I'd head here. It was a favourite royal residence from the time of Louis XII (late 1400s) right through Gaston d'Orleans, brother of Louis XIII (up to 1660) and was the setting for a rich tapestry of intrigue, romance, murder and merriment. The audioguide does a good job of painting those historical pictures and debunking myths. Like the one about how the room of many cabinets was used by Catherine de Medici to store her poisons. Nope. Just a particularly beautiful Renaissance space to show off collections. Blois is huge, with three wings (late Medieval, high Renaissance and Louis XIII), 564 rooms and 75 staircases. You'll only explore a fraction of that, but it will still take you several hours.

The chateau has been owned by the state and run as a museum since the mid 1800s and benefits from a long tradition of restoration. Much of what you see today is thanks to an architect called Felix Duban, who made it his mission to bring the place back to life. (His work at Blois is a French version of what Pugin and Barry got up to with London's Houses of Parliament.) He reproduced lavish wall coverings, manufactured replacement patterned tiles, re-painted decorative ceilings, replaced decorative carvings. The result is a progression of opulent, richly-coloured rooms. The enormous main circular staircase and the great hall of the Estates-General, with its vast lapis-blue ceiling dotted with gold fleur-de-lis, is particularly impressive. There are some fascinating rooms that explain the restoration and show you how badly damaged the stuff that got replaced was. Displays throughout help you to understand some of the more momentous historical events that took place here. Not just my favourite royal palace in the Loire ... I prefer Blois to Versailles.

Chenonceau - Best for Beauty

Legendary as a feminine castle, Chenonceau is almost exclusively associated with women owners, most notably Diane de Poiters and Marie de Medici. Its exquisite architecture and unique position spanning the river Cher makes it one of the most photographed locations in France, and it's the country's 2nd most visited tourist attraction after Versailles. It wasn't too bad in April, but it was the only place we encountered real crowds in an otherwise mostly-empty countryside. It must be horrible in high summer.

The interiors are much like Blois, but on a more intimate scale. Thanks to a longer tradition of private ownership, the decoration and furnishing are more authentic. While the central block is a series of opulent living rooms, the bridge is a single gallery used for balls and grand events. An upper level gallery has a recently-opened museum on the history of the house, with plenty of good English translations so you won't need an audio guide. The house-cum-bridge was lucky to survive at all, given it spanned the border between German Occupied and Vichy France, and the owners conspired in illicit border crossings. Don't miss the fabulous kitchens. The beauty extends to the gardens and interior floral displays, which I'll discuss more in another story.

Langeais - Best for Tapestries
Like Blois, this is another 19th-century recreation, this time thanks to a wealthy industrialist named Jacques Siegfried. The place has an impressive history: an early medieval keep that now makes a striking garden folly, hotly contested and badly damaged in the 100 Years' War, and the site of the dramatic (arguably forced) wedding between Anne of Brittany and Charles VIII, it was in deplorable shape by the time Siegfried rescued it. He spent the rest of his life restoring it, and making it a home for his collections of Renaissance furniture and tapestries. The furniture is good, but the tapestries really stand out here.

The colours are fresher than many you'll see in other chateaux. There's more variety in the scenes. There's a particularly lively set showing a hunt in the dining room; I've rarely seen more animation in the human faces, and more accurate movement in the animals. If you're a fan of William Morris, you'll see the obvious source for much of his work here. There are "mille fleur" style tapestries here that are as good as ... if not better than ... the famous examples at the Cluny Museum in Paris. There's an astonishing crucifixion based on a Roger van der Weyden paining and a whole gallery given over to a monumental set portraying leaders from history and the Bible.

Chaumont - Best for Modern Art
As mentioned in an earlier story, Chaumont (pictured at top) is best known for its garden and arts festival. It is, however, worth seeking out just just for the chateau. The great chamber with its majolica floor is exquisite, it's fun to see how the 19th century owners balanced a restored wing with their rooms for modern living, and the art displays let you poke around in areas of the castle that haven't been fully restored. The stable and model farm complex was the most advanced in Europe when built in the 19th century. The views are magnificent; unlike most chateau it benefits from a hefty green area of isolation, since former owners paid to move the village out of their sight and replaced it with an English-style park.  But most memorable will be the installation artworks and modern displays that make this place just a little different.

Amboise - Best for Evolution

There are a few good restored rooms here ... most notably a monumental spiral staircase big enough to ascend on horseback ... but when if comes to interiors Amboise falls well behind all four chateaux above.  Some people may come for the Leonardo da Vinci associations. He's buried in the striking, free-standing gothic chapel built into the ramparts and he lived his final years in a house in town. I was going to assign it the "Best Surrounding Town" category; it has by far the best array of charming shops and restaurants clustered around any chateau. But my husband pointed out that for any fan of defensive architecture, this is a great place to see how a Medieval castle turned into a Renaissance palace. The original ramparts are impressive, and you can clearly see the difference in some of the interiors between the original defensive purposes and the peacetime uses built on top.

Usse - Best for Disney Princesses
Usse is a triumph of marketing. Pretty much everything above is prettier on the outside and in better repair. Usse's interiors are average, though they do benefit from still being in private hands, so you get something closer to an English country house here, with interiors evolving through many styles. Its surrounding town is nothing special, its garden is two narrow terraces of formal, unimaginative planting and it's too far back from the river to have stunning views. But it has a legend.

There's a tradition that Charles Perrault had this castle in mind when writing Sleeping Beauty. There's not a scrap of evidence to support this, but the owners have hooked their marketing to this tenuous link with gusto. Climb up to the covered ramparts and take the Sleeping Beauty walk, where you gaze into rooms arranged with costumed mannequins to tell the story. The production values are clumsy, and they stick closely to the Disney version ... complete with Maleficent's horned costume and the original film soundtrack. (I am stunned the famously litigious Disney copyright team hasn't come down on them like a tonne of enchanted spinning wheels.) But it draws the crowds. I saw more people here than at any other chateau besides Chenonceau, including bus tours and many eager little girls with parents in tow. Inside the main rooms ... mostly 18th century interiors, nothing remarkable beyond a particularly gracious staircase ... the owners have added to the little girl appeal by deploying more mannequins to model a fashion collection. Mostly late 19th and early 20th century.

Azay-le-Rideau - Best for Picnics

I'm damning with faint praise here. If I have to put all the Renaissance chateau in order, Azay is on the bottom of my list. (This is despite rich personal connections here. Two dear friends who are now the parents of my godson got married in the medieval church here; his family home is in the next village.) The interior restoration is basic; there's nothing inside you won't see done better at other chateaux. Azay's greatest strength is its exterior. It's a small but perfectly formed, fairy-tale castle of a place surrounded on three sides by water. Take a picnic. Lounge in the parkland. Admire the reflection of the towers in the lake. Skip the admission fee.

Missing - Chambord is the one great Renaissance chateau that's missing from this list. I'd visited it twice before and it was more than an hour's drive, so we skipped it. 15-year-old memories say the roofline and staircases are magnificent, but it's much like Azay in that there's little of interest inside. Two others ... Cheverny and Villandry ... are going to show up elsewhere as they don't quite fit this article's Renaissance chateau brief.

Three must-see gardens in the Loire: Villandry, Chenonceau, Chedigny

If you want a holiday that majors on great gardens, go to England. Not only was Chaumont a pale imitation of Chelsea (see my last entry), but the other gardens of the Loire can't really compare to your average National Trust property in the UK.

This may, admittedly, be a matter of taste. French gardening style is radically different from the British. While the anchors of most UK gardens are their herbaceous perennials, the French are all about ornamental trees, shrubs and annuals. And that's not just in the grand gardens. I nosed around a big local garden centre and there wasn't a perennial besides herbs in sight. In the Loire's most noteworthy gardens, at Chenonceau and Villandry, these are planted in parterres. The designs are impressive when viewed from above, but there's little botanical interest when wandering amongst them. (It's worth nothing that both Monet's garden at Giverny, and the magnificent gardens at Le Romieu in Gascony that I wrote about here in 2015 are designed in the "style Anglais.")

Still, that doesn't mean the gardener can't find joy in the Loire. Here are three sights to put on your list.

Villandry
You don't need me to tell you about this one. It's probably the most famous garden in France. Deservedly. It's the ultimate in French parterres: annuals and vegetables planted in serried ranks within shapes formed by box hedges.

Resist any temptation to skip the chateau. First, because it's a fascinating interior: an eclectic mix of styles assembled in the late 19th and early 20th century by a Spanish immigrant and his American heiress wife, and still very much lived in by the family. (Their love of flowers is obvious in many of the interiors. Don't miss the beds built into alcoves with floral drapes and covers making them into lush bowers.) Second, because you'll appreciate the garden best from the top of the highest tower, where the various sections spread out beneath you like a carefully-planned quilt.

I last visited Villandry in the '90s, and it's clear the family is continually adding elements to reward the gardeners who come from far and wide to visit. In addition to the three original, very famous gardens ... the vegetable parterres with rose arbors and the intersection of paths, the knot garden with flowers in various shapes with complex symbology, and the Italian garden with its lawns, paths, water and evergreens .... there's now a maze, a herb garden, a couple of English-style gardens walled by high hedges and a play area for the kids. The family has added to the interiors as well, with a Spanish art collection, including a Moorish ceiling transported from a Medieval palace, on display and a lush Napoleonic-style bedroom that looks so fresh it must have been completed within the last decade.

The problem with parterre-based gardens is that they offer little horticultural interest once you're down inside of them. They restrict the palette to a few varieties to achieve the big effect. Still, it is a delight to see and a humbling experience for any vegetable gardener.

Chenonceau
The Loire's most-visited attraction is a must-see for the gardener, but not for the reasons you'd think. Yes, the gardens are lovely. There are two attractive parterres enhanced by their position next to the river Cher, a maze in the woodland and some less formal gardens off to one side of the main approach. After Villandry, these are the best gardens you'll see in the region. But it's the flowers inside that deserve your attention.

Every room in the chateau is decorated with exquisite fresh floral arrangements. You see this a lot in the Loire chateau, but nobody does it like the management at Chenonceau. There are striking modernist displays. Traditional arrangements. Big, bold statements and quiet, subtle options. They incorporate a range of colours and types of flowers; far more, in fact, than you'll tend to see outside in the formal parterres. During our visit, the kitchen decorations celebrating Easter were particularly good.

Chedigny
I can imagine how it happened. At some point in the recent past, the residents of this small village near Chenonceau with no obvious tourist attractions came up with a fresh angle for getting people to visit. "Most of us like to garden. It's a pretty place, and we have an unusual number of climbing roses. Let's have a rose festival."

There are now more roses (700+) than people (500) here, and every year in late May the village attracts crowds to wander around the handful of lanes to drink them in. The French government has named it a "jardin remarquable", the only village to hold the title. Though I was a bit early for the roses, Chedigny proved a wonderful detour with its garlands of wisteria and colourful tulips in bloom. Tree peonies, flowering fruit trees, spring clematis and early-blooming roses added colour. I could well imagine the glory of the festival (27-28 May this year) as I walked by bushes weighed down with buds. An early visit came with the advantage of a private view. Like so many French country villages, Chedigny appeared almost empty on the weekday I visited. It was Monday, so even the one shop in the village (a boulangerie, of course) was closed. It was as if all the people had been placed under a sleepy enchantment, but the flowers kept going.

Chedigny is probably the place with the most appeal for fans of the perennial-based, English style of gardening. Unlike the Villandry or Chenonceau, it's free to park your car and have a ramble.

Chaumont disappoints as a flower festival; but as modern art, it's intriguing

I sought out the International Garden Festival at Chaumont having heard it called "the Chelsea Flower Show of France." Any aficionados of England's great horticultural event, however, should modify their expectations. Chelsea, it ain't.

There are lots of show gardens, but there's little emphasis on plants. It's all high concept, garden-as-intellectual-statement stuff. Chaumont's festival runs from April-November, without much re-planting. So rather than Chelsea's perfection, with everything forced into bloom at once, an April visitor here sees immature plants, few flowers and a lot of bare soil. Other than a small gift shop, there are no shopping opportunities, and dining options are slim. There is a bigger picture, however. The wider Chaumont estate, including the castle, hosts a simultaneous festival of modern art, filling the English-style landscape park with modern sculpture and the Chateau with installations and exhibitions.

Chaumont ... even in April ... is worth a visit, but will be better with modified expectations. Rather than comparing it to an English flower show, consider it a massive annual festival of modern art, with about half the statements made in concept gardens. Be sure to include the chateau in your visit. But if you really want to see the gardens at their best, plan for high summer. I suspect, like so much in the Loire Valley, the festival is really intended for the flood of tourists who pour into this region in July and August.

Certainly, gardeners with imagination can see how some of these plots will be delightful in a few months. The bouquet-maker's garden, where flowers for cutting will eventually stand in serried ranks between lines of upturned wine bottles, shows promise.

Another garden formed of planted walls ... white flowers on one side, shades of the rainbow on the other, will be spectacular by June. It was also one of the more amusing takes on the year's theme of "Flower Power", evoking the flower children of the hippie generation.

Another light-hearted garden was the Game of Thrones-inspired "Summer is Coming" (check out the type face on the step to the throne, below) where a "throne of flowers" shaped from disused garden tools stood flanked by banners of floral wallpaper. The immature plants in their gravel beds were almost incidental.

Most of the designers, however, were after much grander themes and deeper philosophy. (Chaumont helpfully translates the copious descriptions of the concepts behind every exhibit into English. Many of them will have you rolling your eyes at their intellectual pretentions.) Several gardens riffed on the theme of global warming, with one disturbingly inviting you to imagine a bubbling toxic pool surrounded by the last plants on Earth struggling in pockets to survive.

A radical feminist designer has given us the anti-man witch's garden, which I actually liked better before I read its long diatribe on how men have been stealing power from, and repressing, women for 3,000 years and that this was the garden of a woman fighting to maintain her authority. Not a word about the plants ... or anything creative done with them ... when the theme could have lent itself to all sorts of explorations of medicinal plants, or those traditionally associated with spell casting.

Others, like much of French philosophy, are simply perplexing. Such as the garden where people are encouraged to lie on beds resembling spa chill-out loungers, looking up at the "flower of evil" that supposedly beguiled the imaginary villagers who then ignored their own gardens. Huh?

One great improvement on Chelsea or Hampton Court is that you can actually walk through the gardens, rather than looking at them from behind ropes. That gives some of the concepts a chance to really work. Like the meditation on the power of the gardener, that starts with a wall of seed packets and no flora to be seen. Walk around it and the garden that emerged from the seeds appears.

In another, you wander a path through green, flowerless foliage to enter a mirrored courtyard filled with pink and red wallflowers in glorious bloom, reflected to infinity. Doubly striking because it was one of the few displays showing any real colour this early in the season. (I assume they'll replace with other seasonal blooms as the festival goes on.)

Given the time of year, the nicest gardens were the shade-lovers, dominated by ferns, hosta, bamboo and other greenery that looked good now. (Though the quality of these plants and the poor planting scheme wouldn't make it anywhere near Chelsea.)

Because of that lack of interest on the plant side, the outdoor sculpture and installation art elsewhere at Chaumont was often more impressive than the gardens. Objects ranged from beautiful (a willow-woven lair worthy of Middle-Earth) ...

... to thought provoking (a giant ruin of a classical face inviting the pondering of fallen civilisations)...

... to the unsettling (a giant Jack-and-the-Beanstalk style vine growing through a barn)...

... to the just plain weird (enter a mirrored geodesic dome, recline on a bean bag chair and watch a seemingly drug-fuelled vision of fragmenting natural forms, with new age music).

I feared that carrying the installations into the chateau would ruin my experience of the place (as the preposterous manga exhibit helped to do at Versailles) but they've done it in a tasteful and logical way. Most of the historic rooms have been left to be seen for their own merit, while the majority of the art is shown in un-restored or un-furnished rooms. This has the additional benefit of letting you roam through more of the building, to get a sense of just how big the place actually is. And the spooky, atmospheric attics with their dust and peeling paint, now curated to include "artful" piles of junk with contemporary stained glass, are really quite fun.

Back in the historic rooms, you're getting the benefit of the wealthy owners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the prince and princess de Broglie), who restored the place and then turned it into a party palace. One wing shows off their private rooms, densely decorated in that densely-packed, historical revival mash-up so loved at that time.

Historically, Chaumont's richest associations are with Catherine de Medici, who lived here and then forced her husband's former mistress, Diane de Poitier, to exchange it for Chenonceau. The Broglies restored a suite of rooms to reflect this time; it features the usual painted beams, impressive fireplaces, tapestries and heavy, carved wood furniture that characterises the Loire Renaissance interior style. Architectural geeks should come for one significant highlight: a rare, complete majolica floor in the council chamber. Like so many of the Loire chateaux, the authenticity is an illusion. The Broglies brought the floor here after buying it out of a Sicilian palace; but it is typical of what would have been here originally. It's in this room that you'll find a modern art installation that blends in smoothly. An artist who works in sugar has created exotic plants from that material, displayed in glass globes as if it's 1540 and they've just been shipped back from the New World.

The other striking installation is in the chapel, where it appears that a tribe of wood fairies ... perhaps friendly, perhaps malign ... has taken over the space for their own pagan worship, draping it in a spooky network of branches, feathers and stones. It's creepy and beautiful at the same time.

Chaumont's garden festival will, no doubt, be a richer experience in high summer, when the plants have a chance to mature. Though, even then, I see no evidence that it will get close to the quality of planting we're used to at British shows. At that point it will also, inevitably, be a lot more crowded. A distinct advantage of an April visit: I was practically alone. If you do come, include the house and the art installations in the other half of the park, and plan on a whole day. There's too much, and it's far too spread out, to manage in a few hours.

This year's festival, themed "Flower Power" runs until 5 November. Tickets for the chateau and garden (including the festival grounds) are £18 for adults.

Gentle Loire holiday starts with chateau, wine and a quiet holiday rental

I am a child of the riverlands.

Born where the broad, majestic Missouri flows into the even mightier Mississippi, flat stretches of agricultural floodplain bordered by forested limestone bluffs are in my blood. It might not be my favourite landscape (I'll always vote for a powdery beach leading to a coral reef), but it's the one that's inscribed on my DNA.

Perhaps that's why ... despite the foreign language, food and history ... I feel so comfortable in the Loire Valley. There are places along the Loire levee where you could easily be in the Chesterfield bottomlands, minutes from my childhood home. The grassy earth embankment falls down to a wide, meandering river with wooded banks and the occasional island. On the other side, fields of new-sewn wheat and corn stretch to little towns huddled against the bluffs. The trick of getting anywhere here is knowing w
here the bridges are, and some are as nail-bitingly narrow and rusty as my home state's worst. Even the grape vines are familiar, though the the result of a few centuries' more experience tends to be a more respected end product. And, just like my home, this is the nexus of many rivers. The Illinois, the Meremec and numerous other tributaries join the Missouri and Mississippi. Here, the Indre, Cher and Vienne complement the Loire, forming a rich ecosystem.

Of course, comparisons only go so far. This has been a much-desired crossroads of Europe for thousands of years, making it almost as lush in history and architecture as it is in agricultural produce.   It is also perhaps the ideal compromise location for Mr. and Mrs. Bencard.  I get one of the densest conglomerations of noteworthy stately homes anywhere in the world. It's hard to drive more than five miles here without some spectacular chateau's tower's rearing onto the horizon, and many are stuffed with gorgeous art and furniture. The bigger ones have spectacular gardens, but a casual drive is enough to delight a horticulturalist's eye ... especially at this time of year, when lilacs, wisteria, flowering fruit trees and iris are all blooming in profusion. The husband gets lots of history, much of it military. It's hard to believe it from today's placid, affluent landscape, but this whole area was a nasty front line in World War II. The Hundred Years war and the revolution left significant scars. You'll even find one of the world's most comprehensive tank museum's here.

If we get sick of each other's sightseeing preferences, it's a simple place to navigate on one's own. (The French kept that Roman fondness for straight roads that the Brits so quickly abandoned.) This is a place to feed our mutual passion for food and wine.   The latter, in fact, is one of the main reasons we're here. The husband (aka chief sommelier) is on the hunt for great light reds. They're produced here in Bourgueil, Chinon and Saumur, but rarely turn up in the UK. There's an equal profusion of quality whites, and even some surprises like sparkling red, all either impossible to get in the UK or far cheaper.

We're staying at a rental property (known as a gite in France) in Fondettes, on the outskirts of Tours. With Orleans, this is one of the two bustling urban centres of the Loire region, but by far the better choice when it comes to the sheer abundance of chateaux and wine regions. We can, if we wish, fill all 16 of our days with sightseeing without ever driving more than an hour; though some days will be spent simply, in the quiet repose offered by our holiday home.

Our holiday home is one of a trio of buildings sitting on a terrace cut into the ridge on the northern bluffs of the Loire. We can just glimpse the occasional glimmer of sunshine on the water, about half a mile away, behind trees, farm fields and the property's own sloping gardens ... now laden with lilac and fruit trees in heavy bloom. Our landlady, the gracious and genial Marie-Claude, lives in the middle; this is one of the outbuildings on either side of her home. I'd guess it was once a barn or garage.

Now it's been converted into a cosy space, with a sitting/dining area, kitchenette and bathroom downstairs, and a comfortable bedroom beneath timbered eves above. (A word of warning: the two are linked by a compact spiral staircase that's a hassle if you need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night; this is not a property for the less-agile.) The decor is bright and festive. Upstairs, you feel as if you've been wrapped in a Provencal tablecloth; downstairs, the high-ceilinged space is given warmth by wallpaper of butterflies supping at poppies and daisies, balanced by contrasting walls of elegant stripes. It's all very French. We have a choice of tables and lounge areas in the garden outside our door, and though Marie-Claude is just a stone's-throw away it's been very private because her primary entry and exit are beyond our view. We only see her when she drops by to make sure everything is going well.

There's WiFi, though not enough to support the Apple TV device we brought along. Thus our evening entertainment is videos run off our laptops. Attempting to understand French TV is probably more mental strain that we want on holiday.

Cooking is always a bit of a challenge in holiday homes. Though we have all the basics here ... two hobs, a microwave that doubles as an oven, essential cookware ... our ambitions have already overstretched our capabilities. Grocery stores here are filled with beguiling ingredients, and the temptation can be to create some magnificent stuff. After calcifying a once-magnificent duck breast and failing to thicken a red wine sauce properly without a bit of flour, we've cut back on our culinary aspirations. We did, however, remember to bring our own knives and a small box of our own herbs and spices; holiday rental essentials for the serious cook.

And cooking here is a must, because Fondettes is an oddly isolated place. While there is a village centre with a few shops and snack bars, it seems to basically be a sleepy commuter suburb of Tours. More historic properties are outnumbered by modern housing estates, big schools and an enormous, modern grocery store. You're more likely to find doctors' offices and hair-dressers than tourist shops and, sadly, there's neither bistro nor the classic bakery to pick up your daily bread within walking distance. On the positive side, it's incredibly quiet and the nearest village with tourist charm, Luynes, is less than two miles up the road. (Photo above, on the left.)

If you're thinking about renting a gite in France, it's worth remembering that most expect you to bring your own towels and sheets, plus basics like toilet paper, laundry detergent, washing up liquid, etc. It's therefore a much better option for those who can drive here; taking up packing sp
ace with all that stuff would be a hassle if you were flying. (Though you can arrange to hire sheets and towels from Marie-Claude.) If you're staying in one place for a week or more, however, this is fabulous value for money, at less than £60 a night for the two of us.

This is our third successful rental through HomeAway.com (known as VRBO in the States), making it my go-to resource for holiday homes. To check out and rent Marie Claude's gite for yourself, visit this page.

Fenchurch continues to delight on second visit

 I gave Fenchurch Restaurant (inside the Sky Garden at the top of London's "walkie talkie" building) a good review in a partial entry last year. A second visit confirms it: this is one of my favourite special occasion restaurants in London.

Great views come with inflated prices, and there's no doubt that maxim is in play here. You get spectacular vistas of London from here, made even more magnificent at sunset. A dinner reservation gets you in to the Sky Garden 45 minutes before your table time (even though it closes to day visitors at 6pm), so you can grab a drink and wander through the tropical vegetation taking in the city below.

Inside the restaurant, all remained as I wrote about it last time: warm, sophisticated, bending over backwards to be resolutely British. Even though our servers ... not a native-born Brit amongst them ... came from a bewildering variety of European locations. Though we only officially had the table for just two hours, if you order the chef's menu all such rules are suspended. Thereafter followed a luxurious procession of eight courses (£85) with matching wine flight (£65). Given that, in my earlier review, I warned that you should set aside £100 each for three courses and some drinks, the set prices of the chef's menu begin to look like good value for money ... if not a bargain.

In a sophisticated, international city awash with exotic restaurants, Fenchurch bends over backwards to be local. (Despite the accents of those who work here.) From the Goodwood Estate steak tartare, to the early asparagus and Devon crab, to the brill caught in English waters paired with buttery Jersey Royals to the Nyetimber sparking wine pairing an artichoke and ham dish early on. That artichoke isn't local, of course; April inevitably forces the chef to look abroad for some of his veg.

It is mostly, however, a testimony to just how good English ingredients can be. Even the lamb (a meat I generally detest) was tasty, served rare with rainbow chard, ewe's cheese and salsify. This was a meal, however, that built to a crescendo with its deserts. First, shortbread with lemon curd, passion fruit and buttermilk ice cream, served with a sweet Moscato d'Asti from northern Italy.  And then, as if the chef understood that our table was primarily female and would feel no meal was complete without chocolate ... a cold chocolate cake paired with piping hot chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream. Simple comfort food if it hadn't been for the exotic Cypriot sweet wine that went along with it. And those views, of course. Now of a night-scape twinkling with lights to a distant horizon.

There are no Michelin stars here, despite the chef's menu and fancy menu items. I can't tell you why, as the tastes and presentation were on par with many a one-star spot I've been lucky enough to dine in. I suppose that's a good thing, as a star would inevitably bump up the price. For now, if you're looking for a good spot for a special event, Fenchurch delivers great food and wine, stunning views and a unique all-round experience that has a Michelin star feel, for marginally less ... and with tables much easier to book ... than an officially starred establishment.

Wanamaker's feminist Othello is interesting, but only partially successful

I don't mind modernist re-interpretations of Shakespeare when they make a valid point. But they can be tricky to make work, and particularly so when your setting is the candlelit, Jacobean-revival Wanamaker Theatre. It's a space created specifically to show off 17th century drama as it would have been performed when written. So swapping male characters for female, using pop music lyrics and having a one-armed actress doing trapeze moves is a bigger risk here than it would be in a modern setting.

Director Ellen McDougall does all of this, most notably casting Casio ... Othello's faithful lieutenant, whose promotion enrages Iago and thus sets the whole tragedy in motion ... as a woman. For 80% of the play, this seems either pointless or downright confusing. But as we near the crisis, it works. First, as Iago gets Casio drunk in order to frame her, we see a woman in a man's word, drinking with the boys in an attempt to be considered part of their fellowship. (I doubt there's a woman in the corporate world for whom this bit doesn't resonate.) Later, when Casio joins Desdemona and her maid to bemoan fate and plan a way back into Othello's good graces, we have a shattering scene of powerless women, acted upon by less-wise, less-mature men in complete control of the women's fate. At this point, McDougall's feminist take goes straight to the heart.

The interpretation might have worked better with a stronger Iago. Sam Spruell was good, but not great, lacking the truly evil duplicity that's made my spine tingle with other performances. What we really needed here was that mix of contempt and fear that radiates uncontrollably towards all women when a misogynist has to deal with them, counterbalanced by excessive bloke-ishness when he's with the lads. Though Spruell's Iago treated his wife (who is also, critically, Desdemona's maid) abominably, he's doing it here because he's a bad man, not because he hates women.

My biggest issue with this reading of the play, however, is that we lose Othello's story. This version could have been rebranded Desdemona, with the Moor relegated to a manipulated chump. We lost the complexities of his outsider status and the tremendous power of his love for his wife. This Desdemona, meanwhile, is far too confident and self-assured. (Though she's admirably played by Natalie Klamar, whose scenes with Thalissa Teixeira's Emilia were ... unsurprisingly, given the re-working ... amongst the strongest in the play.)

Shakespeare wrote a young girl in the devoted flush of first love, her story all the more poignant because she doesn't understand what's happening to her. McDougall's knowing Desdemona is more angry than bewildered. One of the reasons this tragedy works so well is that you care deeply about both characters, mourning that they've both been betrayed into a senseless end. Here, McDougall goes so far as to change Desdemona's last words, swapping out the pitiful "but while I say one prayer" for a bitter scream of "Get OFF" as she puts up one hell of a fight. The scene's transformed into a tawdry peepshow into modern domestic violence. Disturbing and powerful, but it's a very different ... and less original ... story than the one you probably paid to see.

I am, no doubt, overly critical because I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for one of the greatest Othellos of all time here in London in 2008. I reviewed it here. Chiwetel Ejiofor (since Oscar-nominated for 12 Years a Slave) gave us a Moor raging against the machine and collapsing in upon himself. Ewan McGregor gave us an Iago so slimy as to make your skin crawl. While an unknown newcomer named Tom Hiddleston offered a heart-wrenchingly naive Casio. When this Othello realised the magnitude of his stupidity and gathered his murdered wife into his arms, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Back at the Wanamaker, the feminist version is sold out. As are most performances in this tiny jewel box of a theatre. If you're a fan of the play, but didn't get a ticket, don't mourn too much. It was interesting, but definitely not an Othello for the ages.