En un regard
Le château en bref
Marke Castle is a country house built between 1802 and 1807 on the banks of the Markebeek, south of Kortrijk, as the summer residence of the linen merchant François van Ruymbeke and his wife Marie-Thérèse Delebecq, widow of Jean Bethune. The plans were drawn up by Jean-Baptiste Pisson of Ghent, while Benjamin Dewarlez of Lille supervised the construction and also designed the park. Square in plan, the rendered building, painted yellow on a plinth of blue stone, has three bays and three storeys above a basement, under a hipped roof surmounted by a belvedere. Its restrained Directoire style, influenced by Palladio, combines Tuscan pilasters, a triangular pediment and a double staircase flanked by lions. Inside, completed between 1808 and 1811, the highlights include the vestibule with its black and white marble floor, the circular staircase whose base is a caryatid with an "Egyptian" head, and the dining room decorated with medallions depicting the four times of day. The orangery, dating from 1810, has housed a library since 1952; the stables and the gardener's house date from 1840, and the outbuildings from 1880. The landscape park, with its ponds, ice house, Lourdes grotto and walled oval kitchen garden, has been protected as a landscape since 1965, the same year the house was listed as a monument. The Bethune family still lives there.
