Château rental for family holidays, with several families or friends

A château rental for family holidays is a simpler idea than it sounds: a large holiday home, with the bedrooms, the drawing rooms, the kitchen and the grounds, rented to a single family or a group of friends for a week. Our forty-five châteaux, estates and family-run manors are booked Saturday to Saturday in summer, by the weekend the rest of the year. From 11 to 50 beds, from 5 to 350 hectares of grounds, a pool in most of them, and owners who welcome you then leave you the house. It is the château to rent for several families, the cousins’ reunion, the grandparents and their grandchildren, without anyone sleeping in the living room.

A château to rent for several families: accommodation for three generations

The question of holidays together comes down to a house that is big enough. A château answers better than a large cottage: many bedrooms, far apart from one another, several drawing rooms so everyone finds a corner, a dining room where twenty-five people eat together, a kitchen built for it. Château de Collanges sleeps 23 — 17 in the château, 6 in the guest house —, La Bijoire 25 in 40 hectares near the Vendée beaches, Les Louteaux 28 in the Bourbonnais, Les Boissières 26 near Uzès with a sauna and air conditioning. For a château holiday with friends, the same estate works as ten couples; for families, the enclosed grounds and the fenced pool matter more than the number of drawing rooms.

What a château rental includes, and its price

The weekly price is for the whole property, not a room: accommodation for the entire group, utilities, household linen, beds made, upkeep of the grounds and pool, end-of-stay cleaning. Price tables are published on every listing, by season. For a summer week, count on €3,000 to €11,000 depending on the size of the château — €4,600 at Le Trioulou for 15 people, €7,200 at Collanges for 23, €9,800 at La Meynardie for 23, €10,500 at La Bijoire for 25 — that is between €250 and €450 per person for the week. It is the price of a luxury cottage or three ordinary rentals put together, for a single house where everyone is together.

Château holidays in ten regions

The South-West and the Périgord hold the largest number of houses, between the Dordogne, the Lot, the Aveyron and the Ariège; the West offers the Vendée and Anjou thirty minutes from the ocean; the Gard and the Var coast, the pool and the sea; the Auvergne, rivers and volcanoes; Normandy, Burgundy and the Loire châteaux, weeks of sightseeing an hour by train from Paris. Each listing describes what is around — markets, swimming spots, châteaux to visit — because a group château rental is chosen as much for the region as for the accommodation itself.