Château d'Armaillé

It was constructed on the site of an ancient Capuchin[1] monastery,[2] which was transformed following the French Revolution to become an 80-room, private hunting lodge and home in the middle of the Royal Forest.

[3] While many other Renaissance style châteaux flourished in the Loire Valley, medieval fortresses such as Royal City of Loches make these surroundings fairly unique, because of the Château d'Armaille's close proximity to the center of such a historic urban region.

Due to the character of its residence and keep, Loches is one of the most beautiful fortified cities in France,[4] and the royal citadel dominates the surrounding skyline with Indre's bucolic valley and the medieval townships on either side.

Remains of the once-ubiquitous chateaux-forts are scattered throughout the Loire Valley, but in the small town of Loches, a half-hour's drive south of Tours, the feudal past has been preserved with such remarkable integrity that it takes on the aura of a world of its own.

Perched atop a rocky promontory, Loches rises with appropriately daunting perpendicularity above the valley of the Indre River, a gentle, somewhat dawdling tributary of the Loire.

A plaque in the floor of the hall recalls the castle's greatest historical moment: it was here that, fresh from her astonishing victory at Orleans, in the first days of June 1429, Joan of Arc came to persuade Charles VII to go to Rheims to be crowned, an event that led eventually to the final expulsion of the English from France.

~New York Times - 08/18/1991: "The Stone Fortress of Loches"[6] According to French newspaper La Nouvelle Republic, Armaillé returned to private ownership in 2019.

However, the main building will once again serve as a private residence, this time for a technology-based family from Montreal, with roots in the nearby Poitou-Charentes région and Le Mans.