Château de Courcelles

The château de Courcelles stands in the suburbs of Reims, a fine bourgeois house built as a small palace rather than a country retreat. Its architect was Antoine-Martin Garnaud, a Parisian who won the Prix de Rome in 1817. The building follows a strict neoclassical plan, a rectangle two storeys high with regular rows of windows grouped in threes and framed by columns and pilasters. A central pediment marks the main entrance, projecting slightly forward from the façade. During the First World War shrapnel damaged the house, but it was restored in 1920. The house is surrounded by a park and retains the calm dignity of its 19th-century design. Inside, the ground-floor salon and the roofs are protected as historic monuments. The façades themselves were inscribed in 1999, recognising their architectural importance. The layout inside keeps the symmetry and proportion of the exterior, with tall windows letting in steady northern light. Garnaud’s training in Rome shows in the crisp entablature and the careful balance of voids and solids. Visitors walk up a gravel path between clipped lime trees to reach the front door. The park spreads behind the house, offering long views across lawns and clipped hedges towards the distant Reims hills. Inside, the restored salon on the ground floor has a white marble fireplace and parquet floors laid in geometric patterns. The upper rooms follow the same orderly plan, their windows aligned above those below. The house remains a quiet witness to the taste of a Reims bourgeois family and the skill of its Paris architect.