Château de Chantilly

Chantilly looks like a stage set: pale stone and steep roofs rising straight out of water, with Le Nôtre's canals and basins spread out in front and forest all around. It is really two buildings joined together. The Petit Château, built around 1560 and probably designed by Jean Bullant for the Montmorency family, is the refined Renaissance survivor. The Grand Château beside it was wrecked in the Revolution and rebuilt between 1875 and the early 1880s by Henri d'Orléans, duc d'Aumale, son of King Louis-Philippe, who wanted a setting worthy of the collection he had spent his life assembling.

The estate's great century began when it passed in 1632 to the Grand Condé, the general who made Chantilly a rival to royal residences. André Le Nôtre laid out the gardens for him, organising water rather than flowerbeds into the main event - long canals, basins and cascades set on a grand axis. Chantilly's hospitality became legend, and so did its most famous casualty: in 1671, during a visit by Louis XIV, the maître d'hôtel François Vatel is said to have taken his own life when the fish for the feast seemed not to be arriving. Later additions softened the formality, among them the rustic Hameau of the 1770s, a cluster of cottages that inspired Marie Antoinette's hamlet at Versailles.

The duc d'Aumale left the whole domain to the Institut de France in 1884, on condition that his museum should open to the public, keep its arrangement unchanged and never lend its works. The Musée Condé duly opened in April 1898, and it is still presented as he arranged it. It is considered the second most important collection of old master paintings in France after the Louvre, with works by Raphael, Botticelli and Poussin, and its library holds some 1,500 manuscripts, among them the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the most celebrated illuminated book of hours of the Middle Ages.

Almost as grand as the château are the Grandes Écuries, the stables designed by Jean Aubert and begun in 1719 for Louis Henri, Prince of Condé. The result is a palace for horses on a scale that rivals the château itself, set beside the racecourse that has made the name Chantilly synonymous with French horse racing.

Getting there

The château lies about 50 km north of Paris, in the Oise department; the nearest larger town is Creil, some 7 km away. Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) is about 21 km in a straight line. Trains from Paris Gare du Nord reach Chantilly-Gouvieux station in roughly 25 minutes by TER or longer by RER D; from there it is a walk of 20-30 minutes past the stables and racecourse, or a shuttle bus.