The Château de Groussay is located in the town of
Montfort-l'Amaury
Montfort-l'Amaury () is a commune in the Yvelines department in the ÃŽle-de-France region, Northern France. It is located north of Rambouillet. The name comes from Amaury I de Montfort, the first ''seigneur'' (lord) of Montfort.
Geography ...
Louis XVI
Louis XVI (Louis-Auguste; ; 23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. The son of Louis, Dauphin of France (1729–1765), Louis, Dauphin of France (son and heir- ...
and
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette (; ; Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was the last List of French royal consorts, queen of France before the French Revolution and the establishment of the French First Republic. She was the ...
.
History
The Château was purchased in 1938-39 by the Spanish
aesthete
Aestheticism (also known as the aesthetic movement) was an art movement in the late 19th century that valued the appearance of literature, music, fonts and the arts over their functions. According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to b ...
Emilio Terry
Emilio Rene Terry y Sánchez (1890–1969), known as Emilio Terry was a French architect, artist, interior decorator and landscape designer of Cuban-Irish ancestry. Creating furniture, tapestries and objets d'art, he was influenced by the châtea ...
.
Cecil Beaton
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as costume designer and set designer for stage and screen. His accolades ...
's inspiration for Henry Higgins' library in ''My Fair Lady'' was the library at Groussay.
Beistegui created new gardens, inspired by the Anglo-Chinese gardens of the 18th century and by an 18th-century copper tent in the royal gardens of Drottningholm Palace in Sweden. They feature a Chinese pagoda, a labyrinth, a theater of verdure, a Tartar tent, and other follies. The Gardens are classified by the French government as one of the Remarkable Gardens of France.
After Beistegui's death in 1970, the Château passed to his brother, and then his nephew, who sold it in 1999, realizing $26.5 million for the contents alone, many of which had come from another of Carlos de Beistegui's homes, the
Palazzo Labia
Palazzo Labia is a baroque palace in Venice, Italy. Built in the 17th–18th century, it is one of the last great Palazzo, palazzi of Venice. Little known outside of Italy, it is most notable for the remarkable frescoed ballroom painted 1746†...
in
Venice
Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are li ...
. In 2012, it was sold again and the owner is Rubis International managed by Bekhzod Akhmedov.
Description of interior
The British MP and diarist
Henry Channon
Sir Henry Channon (7 March 1897 – 7 October 1958), known as Chips Channon, was an American-born British Conservative politician, author and diarist. Channon moved to England in 1920 and became strongly anti-American, feeling that American ...
stayed at Groussay as a guest of Beistegui in 1946. Channon (who was noted for the lavish elegance of his own town and country houses) described the Château as being plain and old fashioned. With the aim of 19th century restoration Beistegui had replaced modern bathrooms with Victorian style ones, hung bedrooms with
Balmoral tartan
Tartan or plaid ( ) is a patterned cloth consisting of crossing horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours, forming repeating symmetrical patterns known as ''setts''. Originating in woven wool, tartan is most strongly associated wi ...
s and installed stag heads. Channon did however acknowledge "the really remarkable library" as being "sumptuous and superb".
The château and park of Groussay appeared in