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.
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.
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
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.
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