Château de la Couronnerie

The Château de la Couronnerie is a 19th-century château located in the commune of Carquefou, in the Loire-Atlantique department of the Pays de la Loire region in western France, on the banks of the river Erdre (one of the so-called “folies de l’Erdre”).

The name derives from a seigneurie already documented in the 14th century. In 1398 the domain belonged to Guillaume de Couppegorge (also seigneur of Maubreuil) and fell under the jurisdiction of Faye.

In 1656 Guillaume Fresneau, sire de la Couronnerie, built a château and founded a chapel on 7 January 1660. Surviving elements from this period include the enclosure wall and the “Tour des Ifs” (a belvedere). Other remains of the earlier château are the main residential building, a turret, outbuildings with a wine-press, garage and stables, a well, and an ice-house (glacière) — a large thatched pit dug into the ground in which ice taken from the Erdre was stored in winter to preserve food.

In 1734 Joseph Fresneau, seigneur de la Couronnerie and canon of Nantes Cathedral, laid the first stone of the new parish church of Carquefou as representative of the Bishop of Nantes.

After partial destruction, a new château was erected in 1852–1854 by Louis-Maurice Avrouin-Foulon (mayor of Carquefou from 1865 to 1878) on land to the south of the original property. It was built in two stages: first the central section, then two Louis XIII-style pavilions on either side. Between 1884 and 1885 the same owner added the square crenellated tower known as the Tour Saint-Jacques on the bank of the Erdre; it mainly served as a photographic laboratory. Below the tower stands the “Vierge de la Couronnerie”, commissioned by Avrouin-Foulon for his devout and ailing wife Nelie Linsens de L’Épinay.

Access is via an oak avenue nearly one kilometre long, and the domain continues with about two kilometres of woodland to the north. The landscaped park was created in 1860 by the landscape architect Antoine Noisette, who had been director of the Jardin des Plantes in Nantes in 1823.