Catherine Deneuve's former château near Paris is now an elegant hotel

Times

23-04-2025

The many famous men linked to the veteran actress Catherine Deneuve, on screen and off, could dominate this column. Yet the Gallic superstar's most enduring entanglement was arguably with her gardener Gérard Germaine, the slight, bucket-hatted outdoorsman charged with maintaining Primard, her lush Eure river estate an hour west of Paris near the village of Guainville. For Deneuve's last decade as chatelaine of the 17th-century château, Germaine tended the roses, cleared the wooded paths and pruned the cherry orchard designed by the Belgian landscape 'starchitect' Jacques Wirtz — as well as providing green-fingered wisdom and (platonic) love. So taken was she by the dedication of Germaine and his labourers, when she became the first woman to win the prestigious Lumière film award nearly a decade ago she dedicated the prize to 'the farmers of France'.
By that time Deneuve had already put Primard on the market to move further into the countryside of her beloved farmers. But Germaine stayed on as head gardener for the new owner, Fontenille, a hotelier with a portfolio of 11 properties with heritage character, the most breathlessly praised being the seaside Bords de Mer in Marseilles. His brief now is to establish formality and symmetry, to frame the main house as the star of the show. Deneuve's Primard, he says, was more of a jardin sauvage — wilder, more romantic, 'more English'.
Channelling Germaine's passion for the Eure river landscape, Fontenille's owners Guillaume Foucher and Frédéric Biousse have coaxed the property into the platonic ideal of a destination hotel. It's a place for Parisians who want to escape but remain well within the orbit of beau-monde Paris, a rustic retreat where you can still pack your gladrags.
Foucher is the eye behind the interior scheme, done up with the designer Beryl Le Lasseur in washed blues and shades of verdigris to match the surroundings. To the freshly sandblasted honeyed-stone château he's brought in some of the manor-house touchstones we've come to know and love — the plush slipper chairs, serpentine sofas and gilt-framed portraits of nobody's ancestors in particular — and treated us with hand-forged pendant lights hanging down the void of a three-storey staircase, and an intimate foyer with dried flowers raining down from the ceiling like stalactites.
• An insider's guide to the best neighbourhoods in Paris
A suite of reception areas, connected railway-style, is structurally unchanged from Deneuve's tenure. They include an antique-mirrored bar and a boudoir outfitted in tasselled trim and floral wallpaper like a beautiful gown, all with the same parquet scuffed from decades of entertaining. Eleven sets of French doors, front and back, open to deep lawns. During my afternoon goûter of apple tart and champagne I try to capture a heron perched on the river before it flaps off over a shroud of pines. 'No photos, please!'
Upstairs are guest rooms on three levels. Where Deneuve once kept a sauna, cinema, make-up room and eight bedrooms — my guide mentions after-parties and after-after-parties — there are now 14 guest rooms. Deneuve's own bedroom is now the minty-green first-floor signature suite, set up during my tour with two cots and a dog bed, with windows on three sides overlooking Germaine's grounds. In the mansard roof, where Deneuve stored 570 articles of clothing designed by her friend Yves Saint Laurent, are two grand deluxe junior suites with original wood rafters and private lifts.
As for my room, it's in a rehabilitated farm building on the house's northern flank, where a main-floor lounge is outfitted in the same tactile monochrome as the house cat Duchesse, who can normally be found on the large ottoman. The category is the second-tier deluxe, large enough for a small lobby with a bleached-wood writing desk and coffee bar. The king bed faces two picture windows and assorted seating to serve as catch-alls.
Like any great hotel bathroom, this one, with its heated hex-tile floor in hunter green, makes me reconsider my decorating decisions back home. Its walk-in shower could power-wash a large mammal. The modern roll-top tub, set in a window to capture the morning light, seems small until I drop myself in and realise the scale of the room has played tricks on my eyes. Pear-scented botanical toiletries by Susanne Kaufmann are fragrant placeholders until Fontenille launches its signature scent, a 'family-home vibe' of vetiver, cedar and white musk.
A certain type of guest would balk at staying in the secondary residence, however 'curated' with botanical prints and designer lighting. But I enjoy toing and froing, even in the drizzle, with a golf umbrella from the abundant stash. In the intense dark after dinner, the main house seems 'the embodiment of the evening light — its expanse, its silence', a phrase used by director André Téchiné to describe Deneuve herself. I wear my robe and slippers on the gravel path to the spa next door, rebuilt in weathered timber on the site of the old woodshed with a small gym on the floor above. An hour in the hot tub and barrel sauna and I am positively floating back, drizzle be damned.
Meals are a more complex proposition. Out here on the wild border between the sister regions Île-de-France and Normandy, the assumption is that guests will stay put for them, so one has choices to make. I spend several glorious hours at the Table d'Hôte, Deneuve's original kitchen, where little has changed but for the arrival of stainless steel appliances behind the bar. At a long antique harvest table I have a casual welcome lunch and dinner à quatre featuring heated spits of raclette cheese with sides of local beef charcuterie and boiled potatoes — all served with fruity white wines from Fontenille's vineyard in the Luberon (from £63pp).
Guests have the opportunity to book the Table d'Hôte with a dedicated server, as well as the old serre, or glasshouse, ample enough for regular flower-arranging workshops (£61) and private candlelit dinners brought in from the main kitchen under a silver cloche.
Lunch at Bistro Martin, in the former orchard house, gets an outside crowd of femmes d'un certain age from Paris's western suburbs and suits on away-days. Helmed by Geraud Dupuis, a young chef trained at Michelin establishments, it benefits from the same pure provincial sun as my bathroom and familiar faces from a small staff that rotates among posts. The short menu heeds the meat-and-two-veg model, with the veg in question coming from Germaine's garden. Mashed potato comes in a café au lait bowl, which seems appropriate as it clearly contains more dairy than starch (mains from £25).
• I've stayed at more than 60 hotels in Paris. These are my favourites
A vestiaire divides Bistro Martin from the fine-dining restaurant Les Chemins, also under Dupuis' direction. And if you're at all concerned that the French have distanced themselves from rich sauces and foie gras, you will happily find them here, on a five or seven-course menu that includes show-offy coquilles Saint Jacques in shells the colour of a cosmopolitan. A duck breast is as delicately plated as sashimi (five-course menu £118pp). But the small, sporadic plates seem much of a muchness on holiday in the fresh air, famished from a day's walking and steeping — and, in summer, swimming in a 25m heated outdoor pool appointed with photogenic nautical-stripe loungers. I find myself wistful for the breakfast buffet. But, like I said, it's one option out of many.
A guest can feel as if they're being wooed, with flowers and wine and cheese five ways, all available as paid 'experiences' in the name of self-improvement. I feel like saying, 'I'm here. You've got me.'
I'm happy simply roaming the grounds, for which I'm encouraged to pull on a pair of house wellies (does Deneuve wear practical footwear in nature, I wonder). Germaine joins me on my first round and points out the magnolia trees he transplanted, the bulbous manicured bushes in place of former wheat fields, the sleeping beds of peonies. He also invites me to plant a tree on the plot where he's reforesting copses of pine and oak that were stricken by virus.
• 25 of the best short breaks in France
I carry on alone around the livestock pen. With the sun hovering behind, every sheep has a silver lining, and the donkey too — upon foolishly leaning in to snap a photo I am promptly zapped by the electric fence. The 100 acres aren't quite large enough to get lost in but the quiet is transporting.
I end up at a deserted terrace by the river, where I assume in summer a handsome waiter will appear with a wine list. Fontenille recently purchased six hectares on the opposite bank, a former hunting ground from which they'll no longer have to worry about stray bullets. For now, Foucher and Biousse plan to leave it be, 'to hold it for the environment', Germaine says. Or perhaps next time I come there will be more mise-en-scène to crow about.
This article contains affiliate links that can earn us revenueEllen Himelfarb was a guest of Domaine de Primard, which has room-only doubles from £250 (lesdomainesdefontenille.com), and of Eurostar, which has return fares between London and Paris from £98 (eurostar.com)