Château du Champ de Bataille

Built by Louis Le Vau - who would soon make his name at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles - for a Frondeur in exile, the château is unusual in its very conception: two buildings set opposite one another, facing across the courtyard. In 1992, its new owner, Jacques Garcia, began a transformation of his own. Not so much a restoration as a complete reimagining, it extended from the interiors to the gardens, leaving him free to reinvent the estate from one end to the other.

Each room has its own masterpiece. Among them is a vase once set on the roof of the Trianon de Porcelaine, commissioned by Louis XIV and demolished just seventeen years after it was built. Today, the vase has returned to something rather more modest: it holds a plant.

Outside, the scale of the imagination grows. With his longtime collaborator, landscape gardener Patrick Pottier, Jacques Garcia transformed what had been little more than lawns and groves into a succession of French formal gardens, a Mughal palace and Chinese-inspired tropical greenhouses. Inside the latter, orchids flourish alongside cascades that lead towards a Napoleon III-style glass-roofed salon, then on to a Chinese room where opalines, jades and carved dragons serving as armchairs seem to converse.

The château remains Garcia’s private residence. Perhaps that is the most revealing detail of all: here, creating a work of art and living inside it amount to much the same thing.