What do you do on a *hot* September day in Paris? You take the RER and head to Sceaux, that's what!
The chateau is super easy to get to, just 20 minutes from the city centre on the RER B line will get you to the 'Parc de Sceaux' stop, after which it'll take you 10 minutes to walk to the entrance to the chateau and the its parc.
Right, admin part done, time to talk about the place itself. The chateau is quite small and you can only visit the ground floor and the exhibition space on the second level - that being said it's very quaint and has lots of interesting artefacts and beautiful decoration - especially in the grand room with the blue - gold - white decoration.
It used to the the residence of Colbert, Louis XIV's right hand man and minister of finance. Pretty much the same team was employed as that which designed Versailles (if you haven't already, I wrote a pretty exhaustive article about it HERE): Le Nôtre planned the gardens, Mansart designed most of the outbuildings, the Perrault brothers were in charge of the main chateau and Le Brun was responsible of the interior decoration. The building was actually recalled by the state during the French Revolution and it was afterwards demolished - the facade as we see it today dates from the Second Empire (mid 1800s) period and is meant to imitate traditional French architecture in the style of Louis XIII.
The gardens are lovely and quite big with lots of options: there's the orangerie and scented gardens which smelt beautifully of lavender, the grand parterre gardens, a big natural forest sort of place which is great for walks and simple gardens around the grand water canal - which is great for picnics by the way :)
Make the most of the sunshine and escape Paris for a bit of a nature infusion! xx
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