Domaine de Marc Seguin, Historical estate in Annonay, France.

The domaine de Marc Seguin is an estate in Annonay with multiple structures including residential buildings, a chapel, greenhouses, workshops, an observatory, and a caretaker's lodge arranged across the grounds. The layout reflects a working property where research, production, and daily operations took place side by side.

Varagnes was held by the Chomel de Varagnes family from 1044 to 1791, then sold to Pierre Peyron in 1791 for 17,000 livres and split into Varagnes le Haut and Varagnes le Bas. Marc Seguin, nearly 75, bought Varagnes d'Haut from his father-in-law Mathieu Duret in 1858 to return to Annonay and study astronomy. He converted the remains of a fortified house into a retreat for science and culture, adding an observatory, mechanics and chemistry workshops, a library, a painting studio, a chapel, a forge, a joinery, a washhouse and a revolutionary drying room.

The name Varagnes is popularly linked to "varagner", said to mean gleaning, though many places in southern France share the name with other meanings. The chapel, built for three hundred people, was served by a chaplain, and its tribunes connect it to the winter garden so guests need not go outside in cold weather.

The estate lies on the Varagnes hill in Annonay, Ardèche, and is a monument historique inscrit. Valérie Seguin Lefèvre, a descendant of Marc and Augustin Seguin, and her husband began restoring the house in 1992. Access to the grounds is arranged around visits, so check opening times with the owners before travelling.

Marc Seguin had a saltwater bathing pool built at Varagnes, where rotating paddles stirred the water to imitate waves. Guests of the estate could bathe in this artificial sea, an unusual amenity for a private nineteenth-century property in the Ardèche.