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Profile
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 Lady Hamlyn discovered the Château de Bagnols in 1987, and with much energy and vision she painstakingly restored the château to its former glory and created what is now France's finest five-star deluxe château-hotel. In October of 2003 she appointed Rocco Forte Hotels to manage and market the château on her behalf.
Dating from the 13th century, the Château de Bagnols is set among vineyards, forests and green hills in the heart of the Beaujolais countryside in south-eastern France. Lyon, which is about 12 miles distant, has an international airport; a train from Paris or Geneva takes only two hours and the ski slopes are a 90-minute drive away. With its towers, moat, honey-coloured stone known as pierres dorées and entrance across a drawbridge, Bagnols is one of France's major historic monuments. The 20 rooms and suites have been painstakingly restored, revealing wall paintings created during the château's finest period when nearby Lyon was one of Europe's great Renaissance cities.
Bagnols offers both the experience of being a cherished guest in historic, luxurious and relaxing surroundings as well as an ideal venue for conferences and product launches of the most select and exclusive nature. The Château de Bagnols is also a unique venue in which you can celebrate your special occasions, from weddings and anniversaries to birthdays and other exclusive festivities. |
 History
The story of Château de Bagnols mirrors the rise to Renaissance prominence of nearby Lyon. The château has enjoyed four distinct periods. The first was medieval, when a defensive fortress was built between 1217 and 1221 by Guichard d'Oingt, an ally of the Archbishop of Lyon. The original three round towers, linked by curtain walls with arrow loops, were surrounded by a deep moat whose dug out earth was used for an embankment from which to survey the whole valley. The Basse Cour, or lower courtyard, was where villagers could take refuge in time of need.
After the Hundred Years War - during which the château was owned by royalist d'Albon and de Balzac families - the Medicis arrived in Lyon in 1466 and were instrumental in the city's rise to the position of commercial and banking capital of France. By the end of the century, Lyon's peaceful prosperity had led to an artistic and cultural flowering. At Bagnols during this period, although gun loops were added to the north tower, the residential quarters were embellished with wall paintings, one of which, an imitation tent, still survives. |
 One particular owner of Bagnols became synonymous with Lyon's new character: the cultured Geoffroy de Balzac, adviser and chamberlain to Charles VIII. The king's visit in 1490 is commemorated in the Salles des Gardes (now the dining room) by the royal coat of arms above the monumental Gothic fireplace, reputedly the largest in France. Its decoration incorporates musicians, angels bearing a coat of arms, and foliage pouring out of monsters' mouths.
The following year, Geoffroy married the daughter of Jean Léviste, a Lyon magistrate who had commissioned France's most famous medieval tapestries, The Lady with the Unicorn, now in the Cluny Museum in Paris. Before he died in 1509, Geoffroy also rebuilt the Basse Cour and enclosed the garden with a wall punctuated by little decorative round towers. With the confidence born of peace, he had large windows cut into the château's exterior walls and added mullioned windows to the inner court.
The second and most glorious epoch at Bagnols was during the Renaissance. Lyon's commerce and industry, in particular its silk industry, had raised the city to a magnificent position in Renaissance Europe. Huge fortunes were amassed, and the newly rich and ennobled merchants began to buy out the declining medieval lords. |
 Jean Camus, one of these merchants, a Burgundian importer of almonds, rice and other commodities, rose to be a leading citizen. He helped develop Lyon's silk trade, became an adviser and secretary to the king and married into the aristocracy. Jean bought Bagnols in 1566, the first of three Camus family generations to live there. While they still added defences - the porch with its drawbridge, the portcullis and the imposing main gate with its surrounding, rusticated stonework - they also gave the Grand Salon its beamed ceiling supported on carved stone corbels. It was the Dugué family who over three further generations, from 1619 to 1711, gave Bagnols its greatest glories. Gaspard Dugué, appointed Treasurer of France in 1614, used some of his increasing wealth to buy the château and the five surrounding villages, including 'oats, wheat, rye, barley, oil, chickens, hens and quails, manorial rights and obligations'.
Gaspard Dugué was the first owner of Bagnols to make it his favourite residence, and the building greatly benefited from this preference. Bagnols became a stately home, a mere day's journey by horse from Lyon and ideal for holidays and special celebrations.
Major changes were needed. The east entrance was given a fixed bridge so carriages could enter the inner court and set down their passengers in the vaulted loggia (now the kitchens). Inside, large rooms were organised to have anterooms and closets. Access was by one staircase to the rooms and another, grander staircase to the ceremonial rooms. An Italian arcade added to the upper storey overlooked the courtyard. The rooms were extravagantly decorated with wall paintings and grand beds hung with taffeta, braided serge and needlework and furnished with walnut tables and chests of drawers. In winter, the walls were hung with tapestries from Flanders, Rouen and Bergamo and fires lit in the great hearths. |
 The now famous wall paintings are the most extensive and of the highest quality yet found in a provincial French château. With the few others surviving in the area, they display a distinct Lyonnais school of painting inspired by the city's textiles industry, known as the Grande Fabrique de Lyon, whose velvet, silks and damasks by now outshone those of Italy and the East. Similar paintings created at Grigny for the de Merle family, friends of the Dugués, suggest that Lyon artisans worked as itinerant decorators. They worked fast, taking as their inspiration the latest Lyonnais fabric designs and mixing them with Renaissance ideas found in books of engravings.
At Bagnols, many of the bedrooms are decorated with the bright colours and light-hearted motifs of Lyon's Grande Fabrique. For instance, the painters gave the Salon aux Bouquets pale apricot walls dotted with floral bouquets, framed by columns twisted with fruiting vines, the whole creating the effect of being on a communed terrace overlooking flower-strewn countryside. In the Appartement Geoffroy de Balzac, friezes of grotesque decoration are distinctly Italian, with cartouches, arabesques and monkeys playfully looking into mirrors. One room, the former family chapel on the second floor, has trompe l'oeil arcades framing scenes from the life of St Jerome as well as the Dugués coat of arms.
The château's third period began in 1711 when it was bought by Joseph-Barthélémy Hessler, a 35-year-old man from Frankfurt who settled in Lyon. Lavishing money on its maintenance and yet more decoration - it took ten years to re-roof it - he removed some of the by now unnecessary fortifications and added an ice-house and the formal garden with its grand terrace. Inside, the Salles des Gardes was redecorated with trompe l'oeil columns framing paintings of the four seasons, all in fashionable 18th-century pale colours with shell and palmette motifs. |
 By the end of the century, the glory of Bagnols was over. Owners took little interest in the château and the break-up of the estate reduced its income. In a brief moment of revival, the Grand Salon (the first-floor drawing room) was decorated in trompe l'oeil cartouches, broken pediments and illustrations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, while the adjacent Salle de Chasse was painted with a scene of hunters in a forest inspired by late 16th-century engravings.
Bagnols could then be said to have lapsed into obscurity for almost 200 years. The château became a working farm and the Basse Cour was partly demolished to make way for the huge Cuvage. It was in 1987 that the present owners discovered Château de Bagnols, a sad but ravishingly beautiful building with leaking roofs, creepers running rampant, cracked walls and a family of crows living in one tower. It was, however, a 'Monument Historique Classe', a building protected by the State for its architectural and historical importance.
Bagnols then entered its fourth period, a phoenix-like rebirth. With energy and vision, the owners have painstakingly brought the château back to the finest moment of its life. More than 400 specialist builders and craftsmen rose to the challenge, while hundreds of specially commissioned items made throughout the world complement the private collection of antique furnishings which complete the interior. Raynaud, one of the old French manufacturers in Limoges, made the blue and white armorial china; Hartzviller, in Alsace, made copies of the 18th-century glass; the old Irish firm of Liddell made the table linen; and Prelle of Lyon made the silk to cover the chairs in the dining room. The relaxed atmosphere of being in a private home is complemented by every modern facility.
Bagnols could easily have disappeared, but revived and revitalised, it is now offered to those who wish to experience perhaps France's finest château-hotel. |
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