Les jardins du château du champ de bataille
French Garden
With its 45 hectares of park, its castle inspired by the masterpieces of Le Vau and its exceptional historical collections, the Château du Champ de Bataille is rightly nicknamed the “Norman’s Versailles” by the public.
About Champ de Bataille, Jean de La Varende wrote:
Here scale reigns. The setting only comes into play after the declaration of power.
It was this scale that made Jacques Garcia decide to buy the estate in 1992. The damage of time had little effect on an architecture that has always been considered a masterpiece of the Baroque style, and which can be attributed to Le Vau, without formal proof, of course, but with the force of evidence.
The Gardens and the Castle, sumptuous creations
For the interiors, apart from the grand staircase, only two rooms had escaped the shipwreck: the upper vestibule and the company lounge. Although degraded by time, their extraordinary volume and the vestiges of their richness gave me the tone to reinvent all of the decor of the Grand Apartment in a palatial way. They therefore allowed me to correctly present furniture and objects, acquired a long time ago. For the most part, they come from royal or princely collections, and were dispersed during revolutionary sales.
The same principle of grandeur guided me elsewhere, when it came to recreating, from nothing or almost nothing, gardens which had undoubtedly been sumptuous, but of which time had erased every last trace.
Only a piece of sketch had escaped oblivion: born from the hand of a great landscaper – perhaps Le Nôtre himself – this document designated the location of a few period elements. They have been scrupulously returned; and for the rest, it is they, with my desire to find the ancient source, who gave the measure and the inspiration for the new gardens, created with Patrick Pottier.
We immediately adopted the idea of a work that was contemporary in spirit, although timeless in its lines. The inspiration of the moment in the forms of time: this will have been the guiding principle of a more than modern park and garden, harmoniously developed in a classic and even Roman setting.
Thus, interior and exterior decorations take shape at Champ de Bataille where the visitor will rediscover this forgotten feeling of atmosphere. Do big and aim high: my perpetual ambition finds its most successful realization here; where I would gladly take up, to make it my own, this definition from Daniel Boulanger:
To beautify is to escape from the little, to rise above oneself. I believe in the sonnet, the cantata, the Sistine.
Le château du Champ de Bataille
8 route du Château
27110 Sainte Opportune du Bosc
Phone : +33(0) 2 32 34 84 34
