Château de Beauclair, Heritage castle in Morville-en-Beauce, France.
The Château de Beauclair is a long two-storey stone building with a steep dark shingled roof, its pale grey facade set in a regular grid of windows. Five tall lower windows with pale shutters stand between two doors, matched by a row above, and five dormer windows line the roof with a chimney at each end. Outbuildings include stables and a farm rebuilt in an Italian style during the Restoration.
The château de Beauclair stands on the site of a Gallo-Roman villa. In 1558 Jacques de La Barre ceded the land to Claude Bourdin, controller of Henri II's stables; it passed by marriage to the Chambly family. René-Charles-François de La Tour du Pin Chambly de La Charce, born in 1746, built the main present structures. He was guillotined on 7 July 1794 and the château was partly burned during the Revolution.
The grounds hosted a recording studio where French singer Johnny Hallyday created several songs during the early 1970s. This studio became a notable space for music production in the region at that time.
The château stands at Bezonville, north of the village on the road to Thignonville, at 127 m altitude. A fire on 7 April 2019 burned about 300 square metres of the roof; reconstruction of the timber frames, roofs and facades was finished at the end of 2022. New gardens were laid out at the same time, French style to the north and English style to the south. The estate passed in 2025 to an events company.
A recording studio was set up in the dovecote, one of the outbuildings, where Johnny Hallyday worked on songs including Que je t'aime, Jésus-Christ and La Musique que j'aime at the end of the 1960s and start of the 1970s.
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