A five-star château hotel near Paris: Augerville-la-Rivière

Château hotels near Paris: what Augerville offers

Among château hotels near Paris, Augerville lies about 75 km south of the capital, just inside the Loiret where it borders Seine-et-Marne, in the farmland of the Gâtinais. The Château Golf Spa d'Augerville stands in a 100-hectare park, and its 40 registered rooms are split between the main château and its historic outbuildings, so a stay feels closer to a country-house weekend than to a city hotel. As of September 2026 it is the only hotel in the commune classified five stars in the Atout France register.

The buildings span several centuries. The medieval platform, the four corner towers of the main building and the moats survive from the fortress. The rectangular main block has a projecting centre and a tall French roof with 16th-century stone dormers, while the outbuildings on either side of the entrance and the round dovecote keep their 17th-century character. The façades and roofs of the outbuildings and dovecote have been listed as a historic monument since 20 August 1976, and the dovecote still has its working pivoting timber frame for reaching the nesting holes.

For château hotels in France further from the capital, Audrieu, a Calvados village about 11 km south-east of Bayeux, is the Normandy counterpart to this Loiret estate.

From Jacques Cœur to Berryer: the château's history

Augerville first appears as a simple place name in a charter of 1119. Jacques Cœur, the merchant who became Charles VII's treasurer, bought the estate in the mid-15th century, when it had been plundered and left in ruins, and had it restored, but he fell from favour and never stayed there. The château later came back to his descendants and remained in the family until 1638. Several kings passed through or stayed, among them Louis XI, Charles IX with Catherine de Médicis, Henri IV and Louis XIII.

In 1825 the royalist lawyer and deputy Pierre-Antoine Berryer bought Augerville at auction and spent the next 43 years remodelling it. Berryer, a cousin of Eugène Delacroix, liked to receive friends there in summer: Chateaubriand, Liszt, Rossini, Alfred de Musset and Delacroix himself. A drawing Delacroix made during a week-long visit in 1854 became the basis of Landscape with Rocks, Augerville, a small oil on cardboard now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After a later family heir, Pierre Clément Berryer, died childless in 1879, the estate was sold at auction.

Rooms, table and spa at the château

The hotel received its five-star classification on 3 January 2023. Suites of about 60 to 90 m² sit in the château itself, each with a separate lounge laid out as a duplex, air conditioning and a desk. Junior Suites, of about 50 m², are in either the château or the outbuildings, overlook the golf course and have one large bed plus a convertible sofa.

Le Jacques Cœur, the restaurant named after the château's 15th-century owner, cooks traditional dishes from seasonal, regional produce, and in fine weather its terrace looks over the formal French garden and the 18th hole. The bar pours wines, champagnes and signature cocktails.

The spa is laid out over two floors, with a sensory area, hammam, sauna and treatment rooms. The estate also has its own chocolate shop, Les Douceurs du Château d'Augerville, selling artisan creations by Hervé Boudot.

An 18-hole course on the Essonne

Olivier Dongradi designed the estate's 18-hole course, created in 1995 inside the château's park. The Essonne crosses the course, ponds line the way, and several holes look back towards the château. On Sunday mornings an instructor runs lessons and introductions, and the estate has a sportswear and pro shop.

The Essonne itself is about 101 km long: it forms on the Gâtinais plateau at La Neuville-sur-Essonne, where the Œuf and the Rimarde meet, and flows through Augerville, Malesherbes and La Ferté-Alais to join the Seine at Corbeil-Essonnes, lending its name to the Essonne département on the way.

Augerville-la-Rivière: the village

Augerville is small: 211 inhabitants in 2023 on about 4 km², in the Pithiviers arrondissement, some 5 km from Malesherbes and 55 km from Orléans as the crow flies. Its centre keeps an avenue of chestnut trees on the axis of the château and a tree-planted Place du Château with the church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul, a wrought-iron cross and a fountain.

Down by the river, a lavoir and a small two-arched stone bridge sit on the Essonne, and lanes lead out to the hamlet of Mongrippon and the Maison-Rouge farm, whose main house dates from the 15th century. The nearest neighbour, Boulancourt, is across the departmental boundary in Seine-et-Marne.

Getting there from Paris by road and rail

By car, the hotel gives about 75 km and 1 hour 15 minutes from Paris via the A6, with local access on the D25 and D131.

By rail, the nearest station is Malesherbes, a terminus of RER line D, about 77 km from Paris-Gare-de-Lyon by rail. Most trains from Malesherbes run only as far as Juvisy, where you change for central Paris. Since December 2024 a few trains a day have run direct between Malesherbes and Gare de Lyon, taking about 1 hour 20 minutes, and they remain in the 2026 timetable. The hotel can arrange a private shuttle on request. Our guide to checking a hotel's location and transport lists what to confirm before booking a château hotel near Paris without a car.

Travellers combining the château with a city stay can compare districts on our Paris luxury hotels page.

Fontainebleau: forest, boulders and a royal palace

The Fontainebleau massif begins a few kilometres from Augerville and covers 22,000 hectares across three public forests: Fontainebleau, Trois-Pignons and Commanderie. With about 11 million visits a year it is the most frequented forest in France. Its sandstone boulders carry some 200 climbing circuits known to climbers worldwide, and walkers still follow the paths begun in 1842 by Claude-François Denecourt, a veteran of Napoleon's armies, who marked about 150 km of what the national forest office calls the world's first waymarked footpaths; his successor Colinet added more than 100 km.

The Palace of Fontainebleau, in the town of Fontainebleau about 24 km from the château and 55 km south-east of central Paris, was used by French rulers from Louis VII to Napoleon III. Francis I brought in Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio, whose decoration helped launch the French Renaissance, and on 20 April 1814 Napoleon bade farewell to the soldiers of his Old Guard in the courtyard before his exile. The palace and park have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981, and they make the natural château visit from Augerville as well as a classic day trip from Paris.

Barbizon, about 30 km away near the forest, gave its name to the Barbizon school, active from about 1830 to 1870 around Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot; Monet and Renoir came to paint in the forest in the late 1860s.

Milly-la-Forêt, Cocteau and the Gâtinais

Augerville belongs to the Gâtinais farming region. Across the boundary in Essonne and Seine-et-Marne, the Gâtinais français regional nature park, created on 4 May 1999, covers more than 75,600 hectares and 70 communes of open plateaux cut by dry and wet valleys. The hotel calls it the land of a thousand clearings and sandstone, and its sandy soils suit brewing barley and medicinal plants.

The park has its headquarters at Milly-la-Forêt, about 50 km south of Paris, a town long associated with medicinal herbs, the simples once used to treat lepers. Jean Cocteau bought a house there in 1947 with Jean Marais and died there in 1963; the Maison Jean Cocteau has been open to the public since 24 June 2010. In 1959 he decorated the 12th-century Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, the last trace of the town's leper hospital, with paintings of plants and the Resurrection, and he is buried inside under the words Je reste avec vous (I stay with you).