Château de Chambord

• 1. Introduction

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  The Château de Chambord in the Centre-Val de Loire region of France has 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces and 84 staircases. Its royal builder, Francis I, spent barely seven weeks there in total. Why raise the largest château in the Loire Valley and then hardly use it? Who actually drew its plans, when scholars still argue over the answer? And how did it survive neglect, revolution and two world wars? Today it ranks among the most recognisable châteaux anywhere.

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• 2. A Skyline Like a City

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  Henry James looked up at Chambord's roofline and saw a city instead of a house. In his words, "the towers, cupolas, the gables, the lanterns, the chimneys, look more like the spires of a city than the salient points of a single building." The comparison fits the facts. The roof carries 11 kinds of towers and three types of chimneys, set without symmetry and framed at the corners by massive towers. Francis I wanted the skyline to echo that of Constantinople.

  The towers also break with French habit. They lack the turrets and spires common in French design of the period. The author Tanaka Hidemichi, who believes Leonardo da Vinci influenced the château, likens them to the minarets of 15th-century Milan.

  Beneath the roof, the plan borrows the shape of a fortress. A central keep stands with four bastion towers at its corners. The keep forms part of the front wall of a larger compound, which has two bigger towers. Bases for two more towers sit at the rear, but they never rose above the height of the wall.

  None of it was meant to defend anything. The walls, towers and partial moat are decorative, and even in the 16th century they looked old-fashioned. Châteaux of the time had moved away from true castle design and had no serious defences.

  Inside, the rooms were grouped into self-contained suites. This was an early example of a French and Italian approach, replacing the medieval arrangement of rooms strung along corridors. Four rectangular vaulted hallways on each floor form the shape of a cross. The façade stretches 128 metres and carries more than 800 sculpted columns.

  Open windows, loggias and a vast outdoor space at the top all came from Italian Renaissance models. They were far less practical in the cold, damp climate of northern France. Where those cross-shaped hallways meet, in the middle of the building, rises its most celebrated feature.

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• 3. The Double Staircase

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  John Evelyn, a visitor who climbed the great staircase, guessed that it had 274 steps and added the caution "as I remember." He judged it "an extraordinary work, but of far greater expense than use or beauty." He also noted that people on separate ascents could cross paths without seeing each other, except through small loopholes.

  The staircase is an open double spiral at the centre of the château. Its two spirals climb the three floors without ever meeting. Light falls on them from a lantern-like structure at the highest point of the building.

  Who conceived it is a matter of controversy. The original design is attributed, with several doubts, to the Tuscan architect Domenico da Cortona. His wooden model survived long enough for André Félibien to draw it in the 17th century. In those drawings, the main stair is not a spiral at all. It is two straight, parallel flights separated by a passage, placed in one arm of the cross.

  According to Jean-Guillaume, this Italian scheme was later replaced by a central spiral, similar to the one at Blois. That change suited the French taste for spectacular grand staircases. Even so, the result remained a triumph of centralised planning, which is itself an Italian idea.

  In 1913, Marcel Reymond proposed a different author. Leonardo da Vinci was then a guest of Francis I at Clos Lucé, near Amboise. Reymond argued that the original design reflected Leonardo's plans for a château at Romorantin, intended for the king's mother. It also matched his interest in central planning and double-spiral staircases. The debate has not ended, though many scholars now agree that Leonardo at least designed the central staircase.

  Archaeologists Jean-Sylvain Caillou and Dominic Hofbauer found another layer. The lack of symmetry on some façades comes from an original plan, abandoned shortly after construction began. That plan was organised around the central staircase, with a whirling symmetry that has no equivalent in the architecture of its time. It recalls Leonardo's work on hydraulic turbines and the helicopter.

  Had it been followed, the château might have gained a quadruple-spiral open staircase. Evelyn and the architect Andrea Palladio both described such a stair, but it was never built. Turning these shifting plans into stone fell to Pierre Neveu, who oversaw the site.

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• 4. Twenty-Eight Years of Work

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  On the 6th of September 1519, Francis de Pontbriand received the order to begin construction of the château. The building then took 28 years and changed considerably along the way.

  The Italian War of 1521-1526 interrupted the work. Royal funds were dwindling, and the builders struggled to lay the foundations. By 1524, the walls had barely risen above ground level.

  Building resumed in September 1526, and 1,800 workers were employed on the site. As the château neared completion, Francis put his enormous symbol of wealth and power to use. He hosted his old arch-rival, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, at Chambord.

  Francis died of a heart attack in 1547. By then the work had cost 444,070 livres. The building he left behind had never been designed to be lived in at all.

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• 5. A House Without Furniture

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  Francis I kept his real royal residences at the Château de Blois and at Amboise. Chambord was something else, a hunting lodge built for short stays. Those stays shaped everything about how the place worked.

  The massive rooms, open windows and high ceilings made heating impractical. No village or estate stood nearby, so the only local food was game. Everything else had to travel with the hunting party, which could number up to 2,000 people.

  For that reason the château stood completely unfurnished. Furniture, wall coverings and eating implements were brought in for each trip, a major logistical exercise. Much furniture of the era was built to be taken apart, so that it could be carried more easily.

  The hunting ground was vast. A wooded park and game reserve of 52.5 square kilometres surrounds the château, stocked with red deer and enclosed by a wall 31 kilometres long.

  The king also dreamed of water. His plan to divert the Loire around the château appears only in a novel, Amadís de Gaula, which Francis had translated. In that novel the château is called the Palace of Firm Isle.

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• 6. Kings Who Walked Away

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  For more than 80 years after the death of Francis I, French kings abandoned Chambord and let it decay. The château went almost a century without use.

  In 1639, King Louis XIII gave it to his brother Gaston, Duke of Orléans. Gaston saved the château from ruin by carrying out much restoration work.

  King Louis XIV had the great keep restored and furnished the royal apartments. He added a stable for 1,200 horses, so that he could hunt and entertain there for a few weeks each year. Molière presented the premiere of his comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at Chambord. Even so, Louis XIV abandoned the château in 1685.

  From 1725 to 1733, the deposed King of Poland, Stanisław Leszczyński, lived at Chambord. He was the father-in-law of King Louis XV. In 1745 the king gave the château to Maurice de Saxe, Marshal of France, as a reward for valour. The marshal installed his military regiment there.

  He died in 1750, and the colossal building sat empty again for many years. Its harshest stripping was still to come, in 1792.

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• 7. Revolution and War

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  In 1792, the Revolutionary government ordered the sale of Chambord's furnishings. The wall panelling was removed, and even the floors were taken up and sold for the value of their timber. According to M de la Saussaye, the panelled doors were burned to keep the rooms warm during the sales.

  The empty château then stayed abandoned until Napoleon Bonaparte gave it to his subordinate, Louis Alexandre Berthier. It was later bought from his widow for the infant Duke of Bordeaux, Henry Charles, who lived from 1820 to 1883 and took the title Count of Chambord. His grandfather, King Charles X, made a brief attempt at restoration and occupation. In 1830 both were exiled.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow saw the damage in the 1830s and recorded it in Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea. He wrote that "all is mournful and deserted. The grass has overgrown the pavement of the courtyard, and the rude sculpture upon the walls is broken and defaced." During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the château served as a field hospital.

  The Count of Chambord made the final attempt to use the colossus. After he died in 1883, it passed to his sister's heirs, the titular Dukes of Parma, who lived in Austria-Hungary. First came Robert, Duke of Parma, who died in 1907, and then Elias, Prince of Parma. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 ended any plans for restoration.

  In 1915 the château was confiscated as enemy property. The family of the Duke of Parma sued to recover it, and the suit was not settled until 1932. The French state has owned the château and surrounding lands, some 5440 hectares, since 1930.

  In 1939, shortly before World War II began, the art collections of the Louvre and the Compiègne museums were stored at Chambord. They included the Mona Lisa. On the 22nd of June 1944, an American B-24 Liberator bomber crashed onto the château lawn. Restoration work began only a few years after the war ended in 1945.

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• 8. Echoes and Floods

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  Around 700,000 people visited Chambord in 2007. Its image has been used to sell goods from chocolate to alcohol and from porcelain to alarm clocks. Together with the accounts of many visitors, this made it one of the best known examples of France's architectural history.

  The design also travelled. Chambord was the model for the reconstruction and new construction of the original Schwerin Palace between 1845 and 1857. In the later half of the 19th century, its style spread across the United Kingdom. William Henry Crossland drew on it for the Founder's Building at Royal Holloway, University of London. David Bryce did the same for the main building of Fettes College in Edinburgh in 1870.

  Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, built between 1874 and 1889, took similar architectural ideas through the architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur. Its twin staircase towers on the north façade were inspired by the staircase tower at Chambord. At Waddesdon, though, the tower windows were glazed and far more ornate than the open ones at the French château.

  Screen and game makers have used it too. In 2011 the Brazilian telenovela Cordel Encantado filmed Chambord as the fictional kingdom of Serafia do Norte. The 2021 work Valiant Hearts has six Jewish children hidden there by the French Resistance during World War II. In the 2023 film Like a Prince, the character played by Ahmed Sylla is sentenced to community service at the château.

  Water returned in 2016. After unusually heavy rainfall, Chambord closed to the public from the 1st to the 6th of June. The River Cosson, a tributary of the Loire, flooded its banks and the château's moat. The 31-kilometre wall was breached at several points, metal gates were torn from their framing, and roads were damaged. Trees were uprooted, and certain electrical and fire protection systems failed. The château and its collections reportedly escaped damage.

  The foundation that runs the estate observed a paradox. The flood had briefly fulfilled the vision of Francis I, with Chambord appearing to rise from the waters as if the Loire had been diverted around it. Repairs to the grounds were expected to cost 200,000 euro. In 2025, the director announced that the Francis I wing urgently needed repairs, and that 37 million euro was required.

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