Kasteel van Kervyn de Meerendré

En un regard

Le château en bref

Kervyn de Meerendré Castle, at Veldestraat 48 in Merendree (Deinze, East Flanders), stands at the centre of an estate surrounded by moats and an English-style landscape park. At the end of the seventeenth century, Louis Van(den)Hecke, hereditary receiver of the castellany of Vieux-Bourg, built a country house on the site of a former seigneurial brewery that had disappeared around 1680–1685. After its acquisition in 1783 by J.B. Kervyn van Lettenhove, the house was remodelled and the park laid out between 1783 and 1809, based on English gardens that its owner had visited. In 1852, Paul Kervyn de Meerendré had the castle embellished to designs by the architect Théophile Bureau, who gave it its neoclassical stuccoed appearance: nine bays across three storeys, a projecting central section crowned by a triangular pediment with a clock, and a rear rotunda with four colossal Corinthian columns. The park retains a pond with two islets, a ruined Greek-style garden temple, a walled kitchen garden already present in the eighteenth century, and an orangery dating from the first half of the nineteenth century. The Kervyn de Meerendré family remained owners until the 1980s; the castle was subsequently restored after a sale.