Château du Grand-Lucé

At the Château du Grand-Lucé, asking for a verbena tea can set off a small sprint, with someone dashing to the bottom of the kitchen garden to pick the leaves fresh. The house runs on that sort of devotion. It is a pale neoclassical château with nineteen rooms, standing on the square of a small Sarthe village north of the Loire. Behind its old medieval wall, eight gardeners look after eighty acres of gardens and oak woods. The grounds are less a view than a larder.

The château was finished in the 1760s for the Baron de Lucé, a confidant of Louis XV, who directed the building by letter. Legend says that when he finally came to inspect the result, he dropped dead on the steps, and nobody knows whether from delight or despair. The statues of ancient gods among the trees, copies of those at Versailles, were the king's housewarming present, which proved rather optimistic.

Restored in recent years, first as a private home and then as a hotel, the house has kept its old panelling and gained marble bathrooms. No two bedrooms are alike, though many have a bed under a canopy and a view over the gardens, and every room has a bedtime book waiting. Where old chairs have been reupholstered, the original fabric has been left showing on the back, like a label stitched in by the eighteenth century.

A day here tends to drift outdoors. The round pool sits where the old fountain used to be, in a sunken garden that always seems a little warmer, and the kitchen will happily pack a picnic to take down there, which makes it a rare French fountain where swimming and lunch are both encouraged. Beyond the lake and its geese, the king's stone gods keep watch over the oak woods.

On Wednesdays it is worth slipping out through the great gates, because the village market sets up right outside them, a cheerful reminder that the château belongs to an ordinary French village. Fast trains reach Le Mans from Paris in under an hour, with the château half an hour beyond, so it makes a tempting weekend for couples and small groups. Only the Loire label misleads a little, since the famous castles of the valley are a good hour's drive away.

The evening starts in the bar, the best joke in the building. It occupies the baron's former private chapel and goes by the name of Jack Pine's, an English rendering of Jacques Pineau that makes a French nobleman sound like a Canadian lumberjack. The cocktails are infused with herbs from the kitchen garden, which also feeds the restaurant next door, so the verbena turns up again, this time in a glass, and where the baron once said his prayers, guests now cheerfully order another round.

Last thing at night, a final cup of verbena arrives, its leaves still smelling of the garden. The baron, poor man, only ever got a single day here, which seems ample reason for his guests to stay a little longer.