Château de Chambord

The château appears across the marshland like a hallucination — too large, too ornate, too improbable to be a hunting lodge, which is what it was called. Chambord is the excess of the French Renaissance made solid: hundreds of rooms, a forest of chimneys and lanterns on the roof, and a double-spiral staircase at its heart that may have come from Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbook. François I built it to astonish, and then hardly lived in it.

François I began Chambord in 1519, and the whole plan is organised around one idea: the double-revolution staircase in the centre of the keep, two spirals wound around each other so that two people can climb and descend at the same time without meeting, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, who was then living at Amboise. Around it the château unfolds in the hundreds — rooms, staircases, chimneys — to a rooftop terrace of towers, lanterns and carved stone that reads like a small town on top of a larger one, with the estate spread out below. That estate is walled: the largest enclosed park in Europe, forest and marsh where wild boar and red deer are watched from hides, and cycle paths run through it. Chambord was on the first list of French historic monuments in 1840 and has been a World Heritage site since 1981, and it calls itself neither palace nor hunting lodge but a utopia that has not given up all its secrets.