Renting a private castle in France is an original – and economical – solution to spend a family holiday in complete safety, and to find those you love, while taking a change of scenery. Travel back in time in France, instead of going to the end of the world! This is what Votre Château de Famille offers you for your holidays.
A successful holiday without going to the other side of the world, only in France
This coronavirus crisis is an exceptional opportunity to challenge entrenched habits. In particular, those of thinking that it is imperative to go to the end of the world in order to “succeed” in one’s holidays. Our castles and historic homes in France are all opportunities to change scenery, to recharge your batteries and to find yourself. At last! after months of confinement. Exceptional places for truly original holidays, magical places anchored in our terroirs, convivial and different places where time has stood still, ready to welcome you, provided you know how to innovate and “get out of your comfort zone”. Neither a change of scenery nor happiness is necessarily to be found on the other side of the planet.
Throughout the ages, the castle has always been a place that ensures security
By nature, the chateau has always been a closed place, reserved for its inhabitants and the neighbouring villagers to ensure their safety, a kind of bubble that has lived for centuries in autarky while being in osmosis with the local territory. A place protected by its high walls against all kinds of threats, plague, cholera, Vikings, shepherds … A place of order for communities in solidarity in the face of insecurity in troubled times.
Through the ages, the medieval castle has become increasingly convivial and comfortable, the walls have sometimes been transformed into the enclosing walls of the park surrounding an enlarged chateau, with its gardens, vegetable garden, cellar… The chateau has become an agricultural enterprise, enhancing the value of the surrounding countryside and its productions, with the pooling of rare resources and equipment, the wine press, the bread oven, the medicinal herb garden…
Today, our private chateaux welcome you and your family in complete safety.
From this period, which often takes us back several centuries, castles now open exclusively to you, in secret places in France, remain almost everywhere, allowing family groups of ten, twenty or thirty people to meet: “together is everything”.
The ceremonial lounges where the Marquis or the Count used to receive their distinguished guests now serve as settings for evenings that bring together an extended family, large and small, in front of the fireplace, around the billiard table, or on the playing tables. With this magical effect, electronic tablets and other personal containment devices have been successfully dissolved. No electronic game can replace the laughter and warmth of being close to your loved ones.
The park, its gardens, its vegetable garden, the swimming pool, its hundred-year-old trees are so many spaces where you can reconnect with nature, so many spaces of health and freedom for everyone, so many spaces of imaginary adventures for the youngest, need we remind you of the pleasure we had, as children, to build our hut hidden at the bottom of the woods?
A different kind of holiday, a creative and moving adventure.
A chateau is also a very large house with its nooks and crannies where everyone can, when the need arises, isolate themselves to write, sleep, meditate, imagine, dream, love… To be both with those we love, and at the same time, alone with ourselves when we want, in the same space and time. To go running in the park alone or with others, to try to recognize its large magnificent trees, sometimes with the help of a guide, so many and so different, and so much the curiosity of the youngest is great to know everything. To identify the holes where the fox or hare family live, who come at night to bite the coriander plants from the medicinal garden. With the children, look at the high branches of the hazelnut trees to find the hiding places of the squirrel families. Measure the size of this centuries-old oak tree at a glance to better calculate with the teenagers how much carbon it has been able to fix on its own… These holidays at the castle are also and above all the place of creativity and emotional intelligence. Nature is the best of schoolteachers by its wealth, generosity, inventiveness, ability to adapt and survive in spite of everything and in spite of us, it has seen others…
Living as a family in a chateau with respect for nature and the protection of life
Living the “Vie de Château”, the cliché has a hard life, and it doesn’t account, but not at all for a life written during the holidays as a work for several people. Holidays and active life, both as an invitation to Baudelaire’s journey, with its “luxury, calm and voluptuousness”, but also as an adventure for several people in a place established in its local environment: no imposed services or timetables, on the contrary the possibility to prepare your own meals, by going to the neighbouring farm to buy your vegetables and organic eggs, or to the local village market, to organise a balanced grill with your forgotten vegetables by the swimming pool or a candlelit dinner with the best regional specialities often unknown in the big city.
An interlude of rooted and local holidays, a moment of happiness lived together in a private place, at the same time a space “from elsewhere”, closed and safe; and at the same time an open space and in balance with its small rural eco-system, an unexpected place for holidays in France, with the guarantee of creating a moment of happiness found in the life of yesteryear with those you love.
We will find more expensive holidays, more harmful to the planet and dangerous for the family, but obviously, it will be less good than living in a family “la Vie de Château”!
