Château de Mailly

A château (; plural: châteaux) is a manor house or residence of the lord of the manor, or a fine country house of nobility or gentry, with or without fortifications, originally, and still most frequently, in French-speaking regions.

Nowadays a ''château'' may be any stately residence built in a French style; the term is additionally often used for a winegrower's estate, especially in the Bordeaux region of France.

Definition

The word château is a French word that has entered the English language, where its meaning is more specific than it is in French. The French word ''château'' denotes buildings as diverse as a medieval fortress, a Renaissance palace and a fine 19th-century country house. Care should therefore be taken when translating the French word ''château'' into English, noting the nature of the building in question. Most French châteaux are "palaces" or fine "country houses" rather than "castles", and for these, the word "château" is appropriate in English. Sometimes the word "palace" is more appropriate. To give an outstanding example, the Château de Versailles, also called in French ''le palais de Versailles'', is so-called because it was located in the countryside when it was built, but it does not bear any resemblance to a castle, so it is usually known in English as the Palace of Versailles. When clarification is needed in French, the term ''château fort'' is used to describe a fortified castle, such as the Château fort de Roquetaillade.

The urban counterpart of a château is a ''palais'' in French, which is usually applied only to very grand residences in a city. This usage is again different from that of the term "palace" in English, where there is no requirement that a palace must be in a city, but the word ''palais'' is rarely used for buildings other than the grandest royal residences. The term '' hôtel particulier'' is used in French for an urban "private house" of a grand sort.

Concept

A château is a "power house", as Sir John Summerson dubbed the British and Irish "stately homes" that are the British Isles' architectural counterparts to French châteaux. It is the personal (and usually hereditary) badge of a ''family'' that, with some official rank, locally represents the royal authority; thus, the word château often refers to the dwelling of a member of either the French nobility or royalty. However, some fine châteaux, such as Vaux-le-Vicomte, were built by the essentially high-bourgeois—people but recently ennobled: tax-farmers and ministers of Louis XIII and his royal successors. The quality of the residences could vary considerably, from grand châteaux owned by royalty and the wealthy elite near larger towns to run-down châteaux vacated by poor nobility and officials in the countryside, isolated and vulnerable.

A château was historically supported by its ''terres'' (lands), composing a demesne that rendered the society of the château largely self-sufficient, in the manner of the historic Roman and Early Medieval villa system, (cf. manorialism, hacienda). The open villas of Rome in the times of Pliny the Elder, Maecenas, and Emperor Tiberius began to be walled-in, and then fortified in the 3rd century AD, thus evolving to ''castellar'' "châteaux". In modern usage, a château retains some enclosures that are distant descendants of these fortifying outworks: a fenced, gated, closeable forecourt, perhaps a gatehouse or a keeper's lodge, and supporting outbuildings (stables, kitchens, breweries, bakeries, manservant quarters in the ''garçonnière''). Besides the '' cour d'honneur'' (court of honour) entrance, the château might have an inner ''cour'' ("court"), and inside, in the private residence, the château faces a simply and discreetly enclosed park.

In the city of Paris, the Louvre (fortified) and the Luxembourg Palace (the latter originally suburban) were originally referred to as châteaux, but became "palaces" when the city enclosed them. In other French-speaking European regions, such as Wallonia (Belgium), the word ''château'' is used with the same definition as in France. In Belgium, a strong French architectural influence is evident in the seventeenth-century Château des Comtes de Marchin and the eighteenth-century Château de Seneffe.

In the United States, the word ''château'' took root selectively – in the Gilded Age resort town of Newport, Rhode Island, large manor homes were called "cottages", but north of Wilmington, Delaware, in the rich, rural "Château Country" centred upon the powerful Du Pont family, the word château is used with its original definition. In Canada, especially in English, château usually denotes a hotel, not a house, and applies only to the country's most elaborate railway hotels, built during the Canadian railroad golden age, such as the Château Lake Louise in Lake Louise, Alberta