Chateau de Langeais
— — a town gate on one side, a garden on the other.
Not only on a wall.
“A château in the village of Langeais, on the right bank of the Loire about twenty-five kilometres west of Tours. The street side keeps its drawbridge and watchtowers; the courtyard side opens onto a garden with a thousand-year-old keep half-standing among the cedars. Inside, the rooms are set for a wedding that took place in December 1491: Anne of Brittany and Charles VIII, the marriage that brought Brittany into the French crown. The town walks past on its way to the boulangerie.
Chateau de Langeais, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Château de Langeais sits at the edge of the village of Langeais, in the Indre-et-Loire department of France, about twenty-five kilometres downstream of Tours on the right bank of the Loire. Unlike its Renaissance cousins further along the river, Langeais is a transitional building: a defensive fifteenth-century range built for King Louis XI between 1465 and 1469, raised on a site already fortified for five centuries. The town grew up against its walls and is still pressed against them; the drawbridge lowers onto the rue du Château. Behind the residential wing, the park slopes down to the ruined keep of Foulques Nerra, Count of Anjou, raised around 994 AD.
The street face of Langeais is a medieval fortress: three drum towers, a continuous machicolated walk, slit windows, the working drawbridge. Turn through the gate and the same building becomes a fifteenth-century house, with mullioned windows, dormers, and slate roofs over white tuffeau limestone quarried from the Loire valley. The shift records a real moment in French castle-building: defence facing the town, comfort facing the king's family. Behind the residential wing, the ruined donjon of Foulques Nerra, a square stone keep raised around 994 AD, is generally counted among the oldest surviving stone keeps in France. Jacques Siegfried purchased the château in 1886 and gave it to the Institut de France in 1904, along with his collection of Gothic and early-Renaissance furniture.
The château has belonged to the Institut de France since 1904 and is open to visitors most of the year, generally from late January through mid-November, with longer hours in summer and shorter shoulder-season afternoons. Inside, the furnished rooms are presented as they would have been in the late fifteenth century, including a tableau of life-sized wax figures restaging the wedding of Anne of Brittany and King Charles VIII on the morning of 6 December 1491. The park behind the château is included with admission and contains the ruined keep of Foulques Nerra, a small playground built into the curtain wall, and a notable Lebanon cedar planted in the nineteenth century.