Château Louis XIV: A Modern French Residence Inspired by Versailles
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Modern
- Eras represented
- Modern
- Civilizations
- French
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Castle
On this page9 sections
History
Château Louis XIV is a modern château in Louveciennes, France, built between 2008 and 2011 in a style inspired by seventeenth-century French architecture. The residence was conceived as a twenty-first-century home that re-created the proportions, materials, arrangements, and craft traditions associated with the reign of Louis XIV, the French king whose rule from 1643 to 1715 was closely linked with Versailles and the centralization of the royal court. Its design drew especially on Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles.
Royal and agricultural origins
In the late seventeenth century, the property consisted of several parcels, chestnut groves, and woodland. During the early eighteenth century, a clearing became a camp for companies of royal regiments engaged in major earthworks at Marly-le-Roi. Louis XIV was developing a retreat palace there, intended to provide greater peace and privacy than Versailles.
Swiss Guards assigned to protect the Château de Marly later established their own camp on the property. Known as the Royal Regiment Camp or Marly Camp, it disappeared in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1797, the camp and its land were sold to Françoise-Suzanne Guyhon Monthaut. She sold them in 1805 to Vicomte Charles-Gilbert Morel de Vindé and his wife.
Charles-Louis Terray de Morel-Vindé, a counselor at the Royal Court of Paris, inherited the property in 1842 and sold it in 1848 to Jean-Pierre Blondi and Adélaïde Halguin. The couple commissioned the first house and outbuildings. The former camp property then became a large farm known as the Camp Farm. A cavalry regiment and several military companies continued to camp there occasionally until 1863.
From estate to new château
In 1863, Dr Duborgia, formerly mayor of Bougival, bought and enlarged the property. After his death, Charles-Émile Clerc acquired it in 1888, demolished the initial buildings, bought additional parcels, and created a residential estate with a substantial bourgeois house and wooded grounds. The Clerc family retained the property for more than a century, adding a stable, a caretaker’s house, and circulation paths.
The estate was sold to a French couple in 1991 and passed through several owners before being acquired by Emad Khashoggi, a Saudi-born French property developer and founder of Cogemad. Finding the existing building in poor condition, Khashoggi had it demolished and replaced with Château Louis XIV on new foundations. The new project therefore replaced the earlier Château du Camp rather than restoring or incorporating it.
Construction began in 2008 and ended in 2011. Cogemad employed an average of about 120 workers each day, including sculptors, mosaic workers, painters, gilders, ironworkers, cabinetmakers, marble workers, landscapers, ornamental plasterers, clockmakers, bronze workers, roofers, carpenters, and coppersmiths. Companies holding the French Living Heritage Company designation also took part and trained new craftsmen.
Ownership and later alterations
Château Louis XIV was sold in December 2015 for approximately €275 million, also reported as US$301 million. The transaction was described as a record for a private residential property. In 2017, the final owner was identified as Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who uses the château as a private residence.
After the sale, interior decorations commissioned earlier by Khashoggi were removed or stripped back to exposed concrete to allow new decoration. This alteration changed the interior finish while leaving the building’s broader design as a modern interpretation of the architectural world associated with Louis XIV.
Remains
Château Louis XIV stands within a walled estate of 23 hectares between Versailles and Marly-le-Roi. The building has approximately 7,000 square metres of constructed floor area, including about 5,000 square metres of living space, and is surrounded by moats on three sides. Concrete faced with stone forms the main construction, while the proportions and ornamental principles refer to seventeenth-century French design. Modern technology, high-tech controls, and energy-efficient systems were incorporated into the residence.
Building and interiors
Reception rooms and private apartments
The residence contains two master apartments, several guest suites, numerous reception rooms, two custom-built artisanal kitchens, a leisure floor, a cinema, a wine cellar, and an underwater room incorporated into the moats. The ground-floor reception room is circular and covered by a dome. Its painted ceiling uses trompe-l’oeil, a technique that creates an illusion of three-dimensional forms, to imitate a fresco concept associated with Charles Le Brun’s work at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Le Brun was the leading court painter and decorator connected with the monumental programs commissioned under Louis XIV.
The principal drawing-room dome takes its inspiration from Le Brun’s unrealized Allegory of Dawn project for Vaux-le-Vicomte. Other ceilings in the reception rooms and master apartments use themes associated with Louis XIV and Versailles. The interiors also contain seventeenth-century-style bronze lighting fixtures and decorative hardware, along with moulded fireplaces in the manner of the Grand Siècle.
Stone, marble, and metalwork
About 860 cubic metres of massive natural stone were used in the building and its ornament. The listed quantities include 80 cubic metres of Lanvignes limestone, 175 cubic metres of fine Saint-Maximin limestone, and 605 cubic metres of fine Saint-Maximin limestone. Stone was shaped into balusters, sculpted tables, fire pots, and carved pilaster capitals.
Marble appears in floor marquetry, garden-level mosaics, book-matched bathroom surfaces, the statue of Louis XIV, and the fireplaces. The materials came from France, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Brazil, Portugal, and Iran, and included Black Saint-Laurent, Yellow Siena, Antique Green, Cherry Red, Collemandina, Salome, Red Levante, Macauba quartzite, Pink Alpinina, Moonstone, pink onyx, Rouge de France, Calacatta Topazio, and Bamboo Green.
The entrance door is hand-carved from oak in high relief, with the carving projecting 17 centimetres. It shows Louis XIV on horseback as a triumphant Roman emperor crowned by Victory, following a model in the War Room at Versailles. A monumental bronze-and-enamel clock on the façade was commissioned to resemble the clock on the façade of Versailles.
Many banisters and balustrades were handmade to reproduce seventeenth-century spirals and motifs. The ironwork was assembled with mortise-and-tenon joints, which connect components through interlocking sockets and projections, and with pegs rather than welding. The dome has a traditional timber frame made with the same jointing principle. Its roof is covered with Angers slate and decorated with stone fire pots and gilded lead finials, ornamental elements placed at the tops or ends of structures.
Gardens and grounds
The formal French gardens contain parterres with embroidered box hedges, long perspective lines, pyramid-shaped yew topiary, and a planted labyrinth. They also include a small farm with goats, a large vegetable garden, and stables. A lower English-style garden follows the natural contours of the property, creating a different arrangement from the geometric formal gardens.
A smaller stone reproduction of the Chariot of Apollo group stands among the formal gardens. Jean-Baptiste Tuby, a seventeenth-century sculptor known for royal garden sculpture, created the original group for Versailles. The copy retains the original’s proportions and details and was gilded with gold leaf. Together, the garden features draw on principles associated with Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, while forming part of a residence built entirely on the former site of the Château du Camp.
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