Château de Sceaux

The Château de Sceaux is a grand country house in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, approximately six miles from the center of Paris, France. Located in a park laid out by André Le Nôtre, visitors can tour the house, outbuildings and gardens.

The Petit Château operates as the Musée de l’Île-de-France, a museum of local history. The commune operates the site as Musée du Domaine départemental de Sceaux.

The former château was built for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister of finance, who purchased the domaine in 1670. The present château, designed to evoke the style of Louis XIII, dates from the Second Empire. Some of Colbert's outbuildings remain, and the bones of the garden layout.

The seigneurie of Sceaux appears in 15th century documents, but little remains above ground of the château built for the family Potier de Gesvres in 1597. Colbert turned to some of the premier royal architects and craftsmen to design a seat worthy of his station, the architect brothers Claude and Charles Perrault and Antoine Lepautre, and the premier peintre du roi Charles Le Brun.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, son of Colbert and minister of the Navy, inherited Sceaux in 1683. He added sculpture by François Girardon and Antoine Coysevox. His embellishments to the grounds extended the formal terraced layout, the bones of which remain, and excavated the Grand Canal, a kilometre in length, along the valley bottom. Le Nôtre laid out a main axis centered on the château and descending in a series of terraces to the valley bottom, then rising on the far side. The main axis is crossed by two grand secondary axes at right angles, one delineated by the allée de la Duchesse and the formal stone Cascade that flows down to fill an octagonal basin, the other the Grand Canal.

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