Around the house
The Loire Valley
A UNESCO World Heritage site. Châteaux twenty minutes away, winegrowers who open their cellars, and a river you never quite finish looking at.
From the door
The garden of France
The nickname is more than five centuries old. Two hundred and eighty kilometres of valley, from Sully-sur-Loire to Chalonnes, on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2000 — the largest French site on it. The river winds between hillsides, vineyards and villages built of tuffeau stone. From here it is mostly a matter of short distances: Chaumont five minutes away, Blois fifteen, Amboise twenty. You can leave after breakfast and be back for lunch in the garden.
Albane & Guillaume
Within a short drive
The châteaux
Chaumont-sur-Loire is the closest, five minutes away: the château looks down on the river from its bluff, and its International Garden Festival is replanted entirely every year — one of the rare visits you can repeat annually without repeating yourself. Then Blois, where four centuries of architecture face each other across one courtyard, and where the history of the kings of France was written. Amboise and the Clos Lucé, the house where Leonardo da Vinci spent his last three years. Then the two most famous: Chambord and its double-helix staircase, Chenonceau resting on the Cher. And Cheverny a little further out, if you want to push on.
| Chaumont-sur-Loire | 5 min |
| Blois | 15 min |
| Amboise | 20 min |
| Chambord | 40 min |
| Beauval Zoo | 40 min |
| Tours | 45 min |
The taste of the place
Eating and drinking
On arrival we hand you our address book, every entry tried by us: our favourite tables, the growers worth going to taste with, and what we like doing around here depending on the season. And if a table is full or a visit needs booking, we make the call for you.
In the cellar
The wine road
Montlouis-sur-Loire, Vouvray, Chinon, Saumur-Champigny: whites, reds, rosés and sparkling wines, from strikingly different soils only a few kilometres apart. Chenin, sauvignon, gamay, cabernet franc, and côt — the local name for malbec. Many growers work with real care for the land, often organically, and a good number receive visitors in the cellar by appointment. You taste, you talk winemaking, you leave with bottles you will not find anywhere else.
At the market
The table
The goat cheeses first: Selles-sur-Cher, Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine, Valençay — three protected designations of origin, all three from this region. Loire fish, which a few restaurants still cook. Local produce at the village markets round about, where we do our own shopping at weekends. And some very good restaurants, from the village bistro to more ambitious cooking: there are plenty here, most of them cooking with the growers you pass at the Saturday market. We will tell you which ones are worth the detour, and book if you need.
Outside
By bike, on foot, on the water
The Loire à Vélo cycle route passes four kilometres from the house, at Chaumont-sur-Loire, and follows the river for nine hundred kilometres to the Atlantic, signposted and almost entirely flat: it is the simplest way to get from one château to the next without taking the car, and nothing obliges you to do more than one stage of it. On foot, the state forests of Blois and Russy are threaded with marked trails. And on the water, you can paddle down the Loire in the warmer months when the level allows — the river is wide, slow and scattered with islands.
The river
and its sandbanks
The paths
along the water
The river
One of the last wild rivers in Europe
The Loire is not canalised: it shifts its sandbanks from one flood to the next, it rises and falls, and nobody tells it where to go. That is what makes it a rare habitat. Grey herons and kingfishers work the banks, and its waters, backwaters and ponds hold no end of fish, amphibians and insects. The meadows and forests along it complete the picture. And forty minutes away, Beauval Zoo, which is committed to the conservation of endangered species and takes part in reintroduction programmes in the wild.