Château de Challain-la-Potherie

The castle was the seat of the seigneurie of Challain and existed at least by the 11th century; the first lord may be the Hilduinus de Calein who witnessed a charter around 1050. The Châteaubriant family held Challain some two hundred years, a cadet branch taking it by an inheritance division in 1284 and keeping it until the line died out around 1522. Jean IV de Chambes sold the estate in 1574 to Antoine d'Espinay, whose widow sold it on in 1599 to Christophe Fouquet; Fouquet planned to rebuild the dilapidated castle but instead founded a Carmelite convent in the village. His grandson was made viscount of Challain in 1650 and the castellany became a county seven years later; in 1747 the Fouquet heirs sold Challain to Urbain Le Roy of La Bourgonnière.

The county title, extinct with the last Fouquet in 1722, was revived in 1749 as count of La Potherie. Urbain's grandson Louis Le Roy de La Potherie emigrated during the Revolution, returned in 1801 and served the Restoration as marshal and deputy; his only son Charles was killed in a duel in 1825, so at his death in 1847 his possessions went to his daughter Louise-Ida, who in 1826 had married François Albert de La Rochefoucauld, count of Bayers. The count settled at Challain, became its mayor and sat as a general councillor of Maine-et-Loire.

Of the medieval castle only one view survives, drawn in 1842 by Théodore de Quatrebarbes, and one description, by the local historian René de l'Esperonnière: an L-shaped house moated on three sides, whose north-west tower, once the prison, was destroyed in 1827.

Rebuilding Angevin castles became a phenomenon in the 1840s, in the neo-Gothic that had reached Anjou around 1835. The first Angevin castle truly rebuilt in it was Angrie, finished in 1847 for the Lostanges to plans René Hodé executed for Louis Visconti; Madame de Lostanges was a cousin of Louise-Ida, and Hodé finished Chanzeaux the same year for another cousin, Théodore de Quatrebarbes. The old Challain was still in good condition and large enough for the family, so its replacement reads less as a necessity than as a way of perpetuating the family's glory, with an evident wish to rival those two cousins.

The couple's first plans, from the architect Châtelain in 1835, came to nothing; in 1846 they turned to Visconti. He proposed a rectangular block with four corner towers in Renaissance dress; they wanted a neo-Gothic skin, and Hodé drew the final plans on Visconti's structure. Work began in 1847 with more than 700 men on site, a few metres from the old castle, left standing throughout; the 1848 Revolution halted it for a few weeks before the count pressed for a resumption. The exterior was finished in 1851 and the interiors in 1854, to Hodé's plans without alteration, at a cost of 280,000 francs; its size earned it the nickname petit Chambord.

The count died in January 1854 in the old castle, leaving his widow, a son Henri of twenty-six and a daughter Marie of ten. The countess carried on, had the old castle demolished, fitted out the interiors between 1855 and 1858 and then turned to the estate: the park drawn in 1860, the orangery and greenhouses in 1866, the Monplaisir tower in 1875 and the entrance gatehouse in 1882. She gave thirty-six years to Challain but lived there little, preferring the château of Soucelles near Angers, where she died in 1884, leaving Challain to her son Henri.

Henri died childless in 1893, and his heir the viscount of Rochebouët sold the castle in 1894 to the marquis Albert Courtès, who stayed there only occasionally until 1907 but had substantial restoration done, adding his arms above the entrance. After his death in 1931 it went to his widow, then to his elder adopted daughter Jeanne Brunet de Simiane, whose only son declined the inheritance when she died in 1944.

The city of Choisy-le-Roi bought Challain in 1948 and ran summer camps there for two hundred children a season until 1970; it was sold in 1978 to an industrialist, and in 1989 to a property company linked to the Unification Church, whose hotel-and-golf scheme was abandoned. The Nicholson family, from New Jersey, bought the château in 2002 and opened the first guest rooms after nine months of renovation; it has run since as a high-end bed and breakfast, hosting about twenty weddings a year. It was listed as a historic monument on 30 July 1980 — façades, roofs and several rooms — extended on 15 March 2004 to the ground floor, basement and park, and on 4 July 2019 to parts of the orangery.