New château, Manor house in Oberdiessbach, Switzerland

The new château is a country estate in Oberdiessbach, built a few metres south of the Alte Schloss. Its central block has a high hipped roof, long chimneys and loggias, with arched windows and a wrought-iron gate in the Régence style opening onto a baroque garden. Alleys totalling 1 km lead to the main façade.

Built from 1666 to 1668 for Albrecht von Wattenwyl, a colonel in French service under Louis XIV, the residence was designed by the architect Jonas Favre of Neuchâtel. It is considered the first purely French-influenced country estate in the canton of Bern and the key work of Bernese secular architecture of the mid-17th century. It has remained in the von Wattenwyl family since 1647, when they acquired the neighbouring Alte Schloss.

The interior spaces display crafted details such as the coffered ceiling in the ground floor hall and French tapestries with landscape scenes that reflect the taste of the 17th century. These furnishings offer insight into how the Bernese aristocracy lived and arranged their homes during that era.

Groups may visit the château from April to October with prior notice. Some rooms and the gardens can be rented for events, and each July the gardens host several jazz concerts as part of the Castle Jazz Festival. The château is surrounded by a working farm of 75 hectares.

The garden was laid out in the English style in the 1850s and kept that form until 2005, when it was converted back to a Baroque-style garden. In 2002 the estate received the Schulthess Garden Prize of the Swiss Heritage Society. The writer Rudolf von Tavel described the house in his Bernese-German novel Der Frondeur.