Château de Groussay

Château de Groussay in Montfort-l’Amaury, France, is an early Restoration château built in 1815 for Henriette Adélaïde du Bouchet de Sourches, duchess of Charost, and erected within the culture of the French aristocracy of the period. Constructed at the end of the Napoleonic era and completed around 1823, the house gained significance as a private country seat linked to figures connected with the pre‑revolutionary royal household and later as a site of extensive mid‑20th‑century transformation and cultural use. Its layered history reflects both nineteenth‑century aristocratic residence and a twentieth‑century reinvention that shaped the present park and interiors.

The first documented phase centers on the family who commissioned the house. Louise Élisabeth de Croÿ, the duchesse de Tourzel, returned from London to live at Groussay after accompanying the royal family during their attempted flight and died at the château in 1832 at the age of eighty‑two. Henriette, known as Madame de Chârost, oversaw construction and occupancy; records give two different dates for her death, one noting 1835 and another 1837. A notice from 1837 states that she was buried in the cemetery of Montfort-l’Amaury and that she had built an orangery to shelter Mediterranean shrubs.

Ownership shifted in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1843 the comtesse Julie de Pahlen acquired the domain following the death of her husband, Pierre Antonin Perry, and she received the emperor and empress at Groussay during her tenure. The estate passed in 1873 to Henriette Dufour d’Hargeville, who was the wife of Prince Soltikoff.

A decisive transformation began in the late 1930s when the property was purchased in 1938 (dates given variously as 1938–39) by Charles de Beistegui, also referred to in some accounts as Carlos de Beistegui. He enlarged and reshaped the house with professional collaborators and went on to alter the grounds and add theatrical and decorative features after 1945. Major garden constructions and park follies were created roughly between 1949 and 1970. Beistegui opened an Italian‑style theatre at the château in 1957 with a performance of Marcel Achard’s L’Impromptu staged by the Comédie‑Française company. He also commissioned interior watercolours from a painter; two series, one showing arrangements at Groussay and another commemorating a 1951 ball, were published together in 1956 as paired albums.

After Beistegui’s death in 1970 the estate passed within his family, first to his brother and then to his nephew Juan de Beistegui. In 1999 the château was sold to the television producer Jean‑Louis Remilleux and many of the movable furnishings were dispersed through a multi‑day Sotheby’s sale that was documented in a four‑volume auction catalogue. On 30 June 2011 the property changed hands for €25 million to Rubis International, managed at the time by Rustam Madumarov. The ownership later moved to Gulnora Karimova; following her indictment for money laundering and misappropriation of public funds, her assets were seized in 2015 and the château was placed back on the market under the condition that bidders propose a cultural or artistic programme for the site. In February 2021 the property was acquired through a real‑estate holding company by the Garèse family, who also purchased the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

The château, its interiors, park, and park buildings were officially classified as historic monuments by decree on 27 September 1993. The gardens have been recognized in English accounts as one of France’s Remarkable Gardens. From 1969 the estate became a recurrent location for film and television work and under later owners occasionally served as a television studio. The property opened for guided visits and cultural programming from April 2016 and hosted theatrical productions and other events in the 2010s. The château has been closed to the public for works since 2022.