Château de la Rivière

The château stands on the footprint of a fifteenth-century lodging and presents a long principal façade that reached sixty-six metres in length by the mid-seventeenth century. The original central living block was a single rectangular mass under a hipped roof; measurements recorded in a 1617 contract give its plan as about 23.3 metres by 8.5 metres. Surviving masonry bears dated inscriptions of 1628 on the west corner tower and 1629 on the drawbridge pavilion, which allow the west portion and the entrance pavilion to be linked directly to early works of the 1620s and early 1630s.

Construction employed reused stone from the nearby demolished château de la Plesse together with a brown sandstone taken from land belonging to the bishop of Chartres when he rebuilt his country house above the site. The main block was extended in the 1640s by two wings and narrow end pavilions backed against cylindrical towers, while large rounded towers mark the external corners of the building. One of the entrance pavilion’s flanking towers was known as the bread-oven tower and the other as the dovecote tower; the dovecote itself retains nine hundred and forty nesting holes, matching the family’s recorded landholding at the time of its construction.

Water features and utilities form an important part of the site’s layout. The estate was surrounded by moats fed from the local river and a drawbridge served the main entrance; later descriptions refer to the moats in a dry state and to the loss of the historic drawbridges. A decorative canal designed for the park was begun at the end of 1637, originally over seven metres wide and more than one and a half metres deep, and was widened to twelve metres in 1642; this canal crosses the grounds and was integral to the seventeenth-century landscape scheme.

The service complex and farmyard are arranged around a large courtyard. Outbuildings are laid out symmetrically with hipped roofs and brick-framed dormer windows set beneath triangular pediments. A late-eighteenth-century plan shows a turn-bridge structure, lean-to stores, a store with a turret for coal and a press, cellars and a bread oven, grain and oat barns, cow and sheep accommodations, stables, pigsties, a well in the yard and the farmer’s dwelling at the rear. The wider designed landscape comprised three contiguous parks recorded in 1794: a formal star-shaped park with eight avenues and a central pedestal, a riverside park on the left bank, and a third plot that contained a masonry icehouse more than ten metres deep.

Plans of the ensemble show a fortified-style entrance platform with two flanking buildings (one housing the gardener’s cowshed, the other the gardener’s house with direct access to kitchen gardens), and a smaller château cluster set within its own moats with adjacent pavilions, guard’s lodging and dovecotes. Rear windows of the main house look out over parterres and meadow plots crossed by the Eure and by an old arm that was later filled and called the false river. Exterior walling alternates brick and dressed stone around window openings, attics are lit by dormer windows, and principal ground- and first-floor rooms were planned to admit light through to the central spaces. The ensemble’s façades, roofs, selected interior woodwork, the dovecote and key outbuildings are protected elements of the national historic listing, and later listings include the dry-moat walls, additional wings, a southeastern tower and the historic arrangement of the park and water features as they stood in 1794.