Château du Douhet

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Château du Douhet, in Charente-Maritime, stands on a seigneury attested from the 14th century. After several transfers it passed to the Vallée family, who were Calvinists, and came to the House of La Rochefoucauld through the marriage of Claude de Vallée in 1618. In 1769 Abbé Pierre-Léonard de Laage, the last lord of the estate, became its owner; having refused to swear the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, he emigrated to Spain, and the château, confiscated, was sold as national property in 1794 to the banker Mathieu Faure. Acquired in 1946 by Jean-François Parfait Damilleville, who undertook its restoration, the present building — whose exact date of construction remains uncertain, since the archives burned in 1793, but which may date back to 1715–1730 — is laid out in a U shape around a courtyard, with a central slate-roofed pavilion flanked by two wings and, on the garden side, a double-flight staircase. The vaulted cellars, remains of an earlier construction, preserve an 18th-century icehouse; a cylindrical 16th-century dovecote with 1,903 nesting holes and gardens with reflecting pools fed by the remains of a Roman aqueduct complete the estate. Listed as a historic monument, the château has been converted into a co-ownership since 2009, with private apartments fitted out.