Château de Pont-Chevron: a Neo-Classical manor and museum

Château de Pont-Chevron, located in Ouzouer-sur-Trézée, is a chateau of Neo-Classical style. Built by the comte Louis d'Harcourt starting in 1896 on the plans of Alfred Coulon, the construction lasted four years and the chateau was inaugurated in 1900. Near the marshlands of the chateau, two mosaics dating from the 2nd century were discovered in 1962. These mosaics were the subject of an important study where many specialists questioned the identity of a portrait on one of the two mosaics.

The chateau has been a setting for royalty and power, with Amélie d'Orléans, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, before he was president of the republic, both staying there in the past. From 1946 to the end of the 1960s, the park was put at the disposal of the Scouts de France every summer, who organized national training camps or summer camps for scouts, sometimes on a large scale. In 1983, a museum dedicated to the construction of Pont-Chevron and the two mosaics opened. The museum was partially redesigned in 2008 to accommodate both adults and children.

The chateau has been partially classified as a historical monument since 21.05.1987. The parts subject to classification are the facades and roofs of the chateau, the communal buildings, and the entrance pavilion. Inside the chateau, the entrance hall, the staircase cage, the dining room on the ground floor of the rotunda, and the fireplace of the ground floor salon are also classified. The chateau is decorated with gardens, a vegetable garden, a rose garden, and a 27-hectare pond, where the remains of a fortified castle are still visible on an island.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons