Portal:Architecture/Selected article/2007-11

The Château de Menars across the Loire.

The Château de Menars is a château associated with Madame de Pompadour situated on the bank of the Loire at Menars (Loir-et-Cher) in France. In spite of successive additions, the Château de Menars preserves a simplicity of planning and of construction, with a certain austerity reflecting the original spirit of the châteaux of the seventeenth century. The later additions are still perfectly readable, with the central body and its two pavilions between which the parts added by Marigny fit and beyond which the two wings created by Gabriel extend.

The corps de logis on the ground floor presents a large gallery nowadays, created in 1912 by combining three spaces. The main building still presents three large parts - the old hall in the center, room with a dais on the left and salon for company on the right - ornate woodwork designed by Gabriel as well as chimneypieces surmounted with mirrors. The staircase of stone, as well as the unusual dado of mahogany in the library on the first floor, date from the transformations effected by the Marquis de Marigny.

Jean-Jacques Cartwright, in the second half of the seventeenth century, arranged a formal garden with parterres, turf boulingrins, a canal with other bodies of water, and two planted avenues "of elms in four rows, one of six hundred toises and the others of four hundred" whence the view contains the Loire and the surrounding countryside.

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