En un regard
Le château en bref
The Château de l'Escaille, also known as the Het Lo estate, lies south of the hamlet of Lo, in Hamont, in the Limburg municipality of Hamont-Achel. The estate grew out of the reclamation of the Campine heathlands: in 1850, the Ghent industrialist Vincent Thiry bought around a hundred hectares of heather there to create irrigated meadows, and in 1852 he had a house and an agricultural building erected, forming the nucleus of the present château and its farm. In 1875, Baron Joseph de l'Escaille, an engineer and provincial councillor of Limburg, acquired some 280 hectares and had the house enlarged into a family hunting lodge. A chapel, a covered terrace and a winter garden were added to the south in 1877–1878. A second tower, to the east, was built in 1906, probably to plans by the Tongeren architect Mathieu Christiaens, giving the château its present form: a square volume of three bays, in brick with cement-pointed corner quoins, under a slate mansard roof, flanked by two square towers with hipped roofs. The style is eclectic, with a predominantly neoclassical character. The late nineteenth-century landscape park contains a tree-lined avenue, rhododendron beds, two large ponds and oaks more than a century old. The château and park have been protected as a monument since 2008.
