Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte
The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, a 17th-century gem near Paris, inspired Versailles. Designed by Louis Le Vau, André Le Nôtre, and Charles Le Brun, it’s called “Versailles without the crowds.” After Nicolas Fouquet, France’s Superintendent of Finances, expanded the estate and hosted a lavish party to impress King Louis XIV, a rival accused him of misusing public funds. Consequently, Fouquet was arrested, imprisoned for life, and his wife exiled. Impressed, Louis XIV hired the same designers for Versailles and seized Vaux-le-Vicomte’s tapestries, statues, and orange trees for his grander palace.
Happier Future; Family-owned
Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte had a few other owners in its long history, and had been neglected for 30 years by 1875 when Alfred Sommier bought it and began a massive restoration of the house and gardens, which was completed by his descendants. Today, the fifth generation of the same family still owns the chateau, one of France’s greatest historical monuments, which is open to the public.
“When my family took over the property in 1875 the place was pretty much empty except for two tables and four busts that remained from the Fouquet time, the 17th century, because the king and Jean-Baptistie Colbert, who was prime minister at the time, took pretty much everything and put it in Versailles,” said Alexandre de Vogüé, who, with his brothers Jean-Charles and Ascanio, own and run the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte.
One of France’s Best Kept Secrets
With 100 rooms on 1,200 acres of land and 350,000 yearly visitors, Vaux-le-Vicomte is dwarfed by Versailles’ 2,300 rooms, 2,000-acre gardens and 7 million annual visitors.
Vaux-le-Vicomte has always been off the beaten track, de Vogüé said. “You have to know about French history during Louis XIV, you have to be quite curious about chateaus and gardens, in general, to really know about Vaux,” he explained. The chateau will never be a place ot mass tourism, like Versailles. The de Vogüés strive to grow annual visitors to a maximum of 500,000. “More than that, the wear and tear would be too damaging to Vaux,” he said. It offers more of an exclusive experience to visitors and donors. “Because there’s a family; I think that’s the biggest difference,” de Vogüé said. “Since the 17th century, there’s always been a family living here and it’s a home before anything else. And I think that’s what people really appreciate here, there is this soul, this “je ne sais quoi,” as we say in French, that makes this place quite special.”
Grand, but also Intimate
All of the chateau’s important rooms are open to visitors. The family members reside in outbuildings on the estate. The sculptures, paintings, furniture, carpets, tapestries, china and silverware were bought by de Vogüé’s great-great-grandfather. The proprietors plan to publish a book on the home’s decorative arts collections by the end of the year.
“There’s a very human scale to the house. It’s grand, but but it’s also intimate, not a palace like Versailles, which can be a bit cold and dry; impossible to imagine living there,” he said. “At Vaux-le-Vicomte, because it was done for a family, people really like the fact that they could imagine themselves having a drink or a tea in one of those rooms, because it has this very intimate and human scale.”
Notable Gardens
The formal gardens have been returned to their original state as laid out by Le Nôtre in the 17th century, framing the chateau in what is considered one of the greatest examples of harmony between nature and the built environment. The ambitious landscape design, with 62 statues, twenty-two fountains, wide pebble alleys, basins, grottoes and a canal, was groundbreaking at the time. “Vaux-le-Vicomte was the first time that a landscape designer oversaw the entire project—the gardens, the fountains, the water, everything. Le Nôtre was given carte blanche. And what he did was a real rupture with what had been done before,” garden historian Frédéric Sichet told AD in 2013, when his book about the grounds, “André Le Nôtre à Vaux-le-Vicomte,” was published.
A subterranean river is to open to the public next year. Those who choose to walk the gardens may take a walking stick. Visitors can also rent electric golf carts to explore the property.
Romantic Candlelight Evening
Every Saturday evening during the warm season, the grounds are lit with 2,000 candles, and there are fireworks at the end of the evening. You can come to dine outdoors – the outdoor ephemeral restaurant is fully booked from the beginning of the season – or simply wander the grounds and have a picnic. “It’s quite magical,” said de Vogüé. “People can eat at this restaurant, al fresco, facing the garden. It’s a very simple idea that my parents created, just to give a very humble idea of what it was like at the party of inauguration that Fouquet threw in 1661. But people absolutely love it, because it’s so romantic and so beautiful.”
During the evening, guests can also wander through the chateau, whose interiors are also set with romantic lighting, and come back outside for the fireworks.
Christmas & Easter
They started having a special Christmas program 19 years ago, and now it’s the chateau’s biggest season, attracting 120,000 visitors. The decor requires artisans to decorate in a very short period of time to minimize closure. “We close only 10 days in November, to set up. And people now from Paris and even from abroad are coming to our Christmas, because it’s beginning to be quite well known.”
And the de Vogüé family has been somewhat pioneering in establishing a restaurant and gift shop in the 1960s, which back then did not exist in France at historic homes. “It was very rare, but my parents really wanted to share this place with the public and create a vivid experience,” he said. “They were already thinking about experience, which today is everybody’s plan, but at that time it was really not the case.” Now, he noted, many chateaus do Christmas, as do famous gardens, like Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, which de Vogüé had recently visited when we spoke for this article.
Easter is the biggest weekend of the year, attracting 10,000 people over three days. French bureaucracy once reared its head, de Vogüé recalled, when on Easter Sunday at 11am a whole crew of government administrators showed up unannounced for an inspection. They had to close for two hours since all employees had to stop working while they inspected hygiene, security and safety measures. Everything was fine, fortunately, but he said, laughing, that is France sometimes. “I don’t know if it happens in the U.S., but it was very scary.”
80 Movie Shoots; Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, YSL
Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte has been the setting for about 80 movies and TV shows over the years, the first in 1968 by director Orson Welles. The James Bond Moonraker movie had scenes there, as did the TV series Versailles, and it stood in for Versailles in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Very often the chateau is used for Versailles scenes, de Vogüé explained, because it’s very complicated to shoot at Versailles.
There haven’t been any fashion shows at the estate, but during the covid pandemic, when live runway shows were replaced by video presentations, several important designers, including Celine and Yves Saint Laurent, chose to film their collections at Vaux-le-Vicomte.
American Friends of Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte
Alexandre de Vogüé set up an American Friends of the chateau charitable organization to help raise funds for ongoing restoration and maintenance at the urging of his late aunt, who was director of development for the New York City Ballet. When Alexandre joined the chateau in 2011 after 20 years working as a mountain guide, she insisted it would be a success. “She really helped me, introduced me to her circle of friends and donors.”
Peter Marino Hosted October Gala
In October, famed architect Peter Marino co-hosted the chateau’s glamorous fundraising gala along with Louis Vuitton CEO Pietro Beccari and philanthropist Christine Schwarzman. Marino is an old friend of Alexandre’s mother, Countess Cristina de Vogüé. Their friendship was the reason Marino decided to help out. “She hasn’t had the easiest time because her husband died and just did not leave a sufficient fortune to maintain such a large estate,” Marino said. “So they really do need to make these fundraising efforts and I can’t think of anything more worth it.”
Vaux-le-Vicomte only began holding galas in 2018 – last year’s was hosted by Christian Louboutin, also a close family friend – and Marino, a perfectionist, was hands-on with preparations. The leather-clad architect also gave the de Vogüés solid advice, including to hold the galas every other year, which makes it more desirable, and also easier for Americans to fly over, lessons he learned as longtime chairman of Venetian Heritage.
“Little by little, we are putting Vaux-le-Vicomte onto a certain map, to raise the awareness about this place, to raise awareness of our mission,” said de Vogüé. “And that’s the whole point, that people realize how special this place is.” And those attending the galas, he said, fall in love. “They had no idea about the story that Vaux-Vicomte has with Versailles. And they realize it’s a whole huge enterprise to maintain this place, and they want to help. It gives us hope for the future.”
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