Sentiers du Patrimoine ®
Saint-Cyr-en-Arthies
Château de la Bûcherie
De la rue du Parc, gagner le château de la Bûcherie. Continuer à la descendre et tourner à gauche dans la rue de la Grande Vallée jusqu’au lavoir.
Prochain point : Lat. 49.05889, Long. 1.74087
The Seigneurs of Saint-Cyr-en-Arthies did have a manor on their fiefdom since at least the 11th century. However we don’t know where it was exactly. Erecting a castle in the present location was done in the 18th century by the Seigneur Gédéon René de Sailly de Pommereuil. In the 1850s, a new building was erected by Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1790-1876), printer and publisher of the Didot-Bottin commercial directory. That was when the castle took its present aspect: a great two-storey building, with two symmetrical avant-corps wings, standing on a big esplanade dominating the park. Firmin-Didot had also some side buildings built: a ‘neo-Normand’ wing, stables, dairy and farm. In 1864, he ordered a new park to Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps (1824-1873), a well-known Parisian landscaper who created, among others, the Bois de Boulogne and the Parc Montsouris. He turned the domain into an English landscape garden, punctuated with different water pieces, artificial islands, belvederes, follies and even a monumental ice house.
From a family of printers, Ambroise Firmin-Didot obviously had quite naturally a library built in his castle, and particularly in his neo-Normand pavilion. It had a particularly wide collection of books of any kind. The book collection was enriched by the family until 1953, when Jean Firmin-Didot died. Not long after, in 1957, the castle was bought by Elisabeth Maupoil, a Countess of Russian ancestry. She had it restored and gave it the name of château de la Bûcherie, after the name of a restaurant she used to own. Hence, this new name replaced that of château de Saint-Cyr which the domain had borne until then. Elisabeth Maupoil hosted several shootings on the estate such as the one of Hibernatus or La Traviata. She created a horse-riding club and would leave her horses totally free of wondering within the park. When she died in 1994, she bequeathed the château to the ‘Centre International de la Langue française’ who sold it in 2010. The château now hosts a hotel and a gourmet restaurant.
