Château de Chémery

The Château de Chémery is located in the commune of Chémery, in the Loir-et-Cher department of the Centre-Val de Loire region. It is situated in the center of the village, set back from the departmental road D956. It is surrounded by the church to the west, the town hall to the northwest, a pond to the northeast, and fields to the east. The castle itself is entirely surrounded by moats spanned by an old drawbridge to the south and a wooden footbridge to the west. Two outbuildings of the castle are located outside the moats: the tithe barn to the west and an old dovecote which is not owned by the castle's proprietors to the southeast. The castle's constructions are organized around a rectangular central courtyard. In the northern and eastern parts are the old common buildings, in the southern part is the main body of the castle, and in the western part is an enclosing wall.

The main body of the castle consists of two distinct parts corresponding to the two major stages of its construction: a medieval part to the west and a Renaissance part to the east. The old common buildings consist of single-story masonry buildings with tiled roofs. They are organized into three independent buildings attached to each other and to the Renaissance part of the main castle. An enclosing wall closes the courtyard on its western side, connecting the end of the common buildings to the medieval part of the main castle. During its reconstruction, traces spaced 1.40 m apart in the existing walls allowed for the discovery of the width of a corridor built into the thickness of the enclosure.

Owned by a certain Regnault de Chémery in 1236, the castle depended on a seigneury under St-Aignan, sharing the same feudal destiny: the Chalon-Tonnerre family owned it, then their descendants Beauvilliers and La Roche-Aymon (cf. the article Paul-Hippolyte for the transition from Beauvilliers to La Roche-Aymon); the castle and seigneury notably belonged to René de Beauvilliers († 1557), 2nd Count of Saint Aignan in 1539. However, the castle's history is poorly known due to the destruction of archives during the Revolution. Endowed with 600 hectares during the Renaissance, it was transformed by the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Saint-Aignan into a simple farm and agricultural exploitation center in 1729, with most of the windows being walled up to limit property tax and allow for grain storage on the upper floor. Owned by the La Roche-Aymon family until 1970, it was acquired by the writer Madeleine Lemaître and inhabited by her son, the artist Alain Souchon; then by the architect Axel Fontaine and his wife Cécile in 1981, who have been restoring it ever since (the Fontaines also own the Beauvoir tower in Blois). Today, the castle is used for various activities. Sketches from the successful series "Un gars, Une fille" with Jean Dujardin and Alexandra Lamy were notably filmed there.

List of historical monuments in Loir-et-Cher

Official website

Resource related to architecture: Mérimée

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