Château de Rambouillet

Forty-five kilometres southwest of Paris, in the Forêt de Rambouillet where French kings have hunted since the 14th century, stands one of the Republic's most quietly distinguished official residences. The Château de Rambouillet has been the French presidential summer residence since 1896, which means it is both a functioning state building and one of the oldest surviving château complexes in the Île-de-France. It is open to the public when the President is not in residence, which is most of the time.

The first fortified structure at Rambouillet was built around 1375 by the d'Angennes family. François I, the great Renaissance king who built Fontainebleau and Chambord, acquired it in 1538 and added the François I Tower, the only surviving Renaissance element of the current complex. The king died in the tower in 1547, one of the more precisely located royal deaths in French history. Louis XIV used Rambouillet occasionally; Louis XVI, who loved the forest for hunting, transformed the château and installed the remarkable Laiterie de la Reine, the Queen's Dairy, for Marie Antoinette, who preferred to play at pastoral life in dairy buildings rather than face the revolutionary pressures gathering in Paris.

The Laiterie de la Reine is the most surprising element of the Rambouillet complex and one of the strangest surviving structures in French royal history. Built in 1785–1787 by the architect Thévenin, the dairy is a neoclassical rotunda decorated with marble bas-reliefs of mythological scenes. It was designed not as a working dairy but as a theatrical setting in which the Queen could pretend to be a shepherdess, collecting milk in Sèvres porcelain vessels, surrounded by the visual vocabulary of Arcadian pastoral, while the French state lurched toward its dissolution. The dairy was completed two years before the Revolution. It is extraordinarily well preserved and is among the most poignant documents of the late Ancien Régime's escapism.

Adjacent to the dairy is the Chaumière des Coquillages, the Shell Cottage, built for the Comtesse de Toulouse in the early 18th century: a small building with walls entirely encrusted in shells, coral, mother-of-pearl and semi-precious stones. It is a masterpiece of the rocaille decorative tradition. Both the dairy and the Shell Cottage are included in the château visit and are the primary draws for visitors who have already seen the grand Loire Valley châteaux.

Rambouillet became the official presidential summer residence under President Félix Faure in 1896. It has hosted significant international meetings: the G7 summit of 1975, the first ever held, attended by Giscard d'Estaing, Ford, Kissinger, Schmidt, Heath, Moro and Trudeau, took place here. The château closes when the President is in residence, but these closures are infrequent and announced in advance.

The Forêt de Rambouillet, 20,000 hectares of mixed oak and pine forest, surrounds the town on three sides. It is one of the largest forests in the Paris region and is actively managed for timber, hunting, still a presidential prerogative, and public recreation. The étangs, or ponds, within the forest are popular with cyclists, walkers and anglers. The forest makes Rambouillet one of the more pleasant day trips from Paris: the château is the destination, the forest is the experience around it.