Château de Favieres
The Château de Favières , built at the beginning of the 17th century, stands on the D 134 road about 600 m south of the core settlement of the municipality of Mosnac in the Charente-Maritime department in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France .
history
A previous building and the land belonged to the La Mothe-Fouquet family in the middle of the 16th century and came into the possession of Jean de Candelay , governor of Royan , towards the end of the century . In 1598 Louis de Foix (~ 1536–1602), the first master builder of the Cordouan lighthouse , acquired the property; at the same time he was raised to the nobility with the title "Seigneur de Favières" . His son Pierre de Foix, who inherited his father's debts when building the lighthouse , sold the property to Jean de Saint-Mauris, Seigneur of Saint-Seurin-de-Clerbise, about 5 km north-west, at the latest in 1616, and he had the castle significantly expanded, essentially to its present appearance. It remained in the de Saint-Mauris family for more than 100 years. In 1715 it belonged to Luc Bellanger, Seigneur von Bourneuf, who married Judith-Anne de Saint-Mauris, daughter of another Jean de Saint-Mauris. Shortly afterwards, a sister of this Jean de Saint-Mauris, Françoise de Saint-Mauris, wife of Jean Tiaule, Seigneur von Verdeuil, brought a lawsuit in which she alleged that Judith-Anne and her sister, a nun in Saint-Jean- d'Angély , are not the daughters of Jean de Saint-Mauris and his wife Jeanne Arnold, but came from the first marriage of the said Jeanne Arnold. There is no detailed record of who owned the property in the following years. During the German occupation in France, German troops were quartered in the castle and the manor buildings.
Todays use
Today the castle is divided into several apartments; it is therefore not accessible to the public. In the western annex building along the street, the so-called “Center Artistique du Château de Favières”, and in the castle park, changing exhibitions of contemporary painting and sculpture take place every year from April to September. The manor district to the north is used today by the "Domaine Équestre de Favières".
The attachment
The castle, on the east side of the property, has two floors and is flanked at both ends of the corps de logis by a three-story pavilion with a slate-covered tent roof , which protrude to the east far from the castle facade. The northeast pavilion was redesigned in the late 19th century in a pseudo-medieval style and is biaxial on both sides, the southeast pavilion has almost no windows.
In the north, at right angles to the west, there is a short, two-story, single-axis side wing with a large external portal on the ground floor and a very flat hipped roof , which is hidden behind a battlement. A three-story tower-like pavilion adjoins this wing in the west, with a flat roof and battlements , one-axis in the north and south and two-axis in the west. The entrance from the courtyard to the west is a simple door with a round arched gable. On the east side a flight of stairs leads down over a stone bridge into the garden; this suggests that the building was once, at least partially, surrounded by a moat.
In the 19th century, a long, low and architecturally very simple side wing was added to the southwest pavilion of the Corps de Logis as a straight extension of the main building; today there are apartments in it.
The south-west side of the property is taken up by an elongated wing of former stables and utility rooms, from which a short wing leads off at right angles to the courtyard side in the north-west and south-east. The outer wall of this building wing, which runs along the D 134 road, is enclosed at both ends by a pseudo watchtower, a cylindrical one in the northwest and a square in the southeast. The latter is the entrance to the park and the entrance to the art exhibitions.
Footnotes
- ↑ Louis de Foix was from 1592 "engineer du roi pour la Guyenne"; in 1884 he had already received the order to build the lighthouse.
Web links
Coordinates: 45 ° 29 '52.2 " N , 0 ° 31' 17.4" W.