The dairy of Marie-Antoinette reopens with its original furniture

Discreet, with its silhouette many times altered and its canals which serve it as peaceful mirror, Rambouillet (Yvelines) remains the most intimate of the royal castles.

Louis XVI adored him, and to convince Marie-Antoinette to reside there, he had a dairy built and decorated in the huge park, that is to say a pavilion where you could taste dairy products. The public can today discover this small building restored with the nineteen pieces of the Queen’s mahogany furniture, hitherto kept in Versailles .

Thanks to the work of conservative Clotilde Roy,, Since June 10, they have found the place for which cabinetmaker Georges Jacob had designed them, in an Etruscan style, fashionable in 1787.

Presidents mirror

In the castle itself, new rooms are, each year, open to the visit, after catering and remembering. This effervescence of the National Monuments Center (CMN) which now administers the premises, is very recent. Rambouillet having been until 2018 presidential residence, the decoration varied according to the taste of the tenants of the Élysée who drew from the reserve of national furniture or commanded contemporary creators a overhaul of the decor.

On the ground floor, the apartment of Napoleon I, who also appreciated the calm of Rambouillet, was returned at the end of 2023, with his incredible bathroom with murals inspired by Pompeii. Above all, upstairs, since last year, a series of rooms has returned to the sumptuous 1950s decor, of style liner style, commanded by President Vincent Auriol and his wife, who wanted to modernize the place and had called upon avant-garde sets that were already working on luxury ships. Other rooms evoke the Renaissance or the 18th century, recalling the taste of other presidents, alluding to international heights … Rambouillet thus offers a refined dive in the political history of France and that of the decorative arts.

Information: Chateau-rambouillet.fr or 01 34 83 00 25.