Château de Villemur, Manor house in Ax-les-Thermes, France.
Château de Villemur is a manor house in the spa town of Ax-les-Thermes built in Anglo-Norman style across four floors. The building contains fifty rooms including multiple dining and living areas plus ten bedrooms with high ceilings.
A prosperous businessman named Georges Goubeau built the house between 1910 and 1919 during an era of wealth and growth. The Fedou family owned the property for about a century before it passed to the municipality in 2018.
The manor is also called Château Goubeau after Georges Goubeau, the general engineer of the Trimouns talc quarries who built it. It stayed in the hands of talc engineers: his son-in-law Paul Fédou and then Pierre Villemur, another son-in-law, both general engineers of the talc mines. The Fédou-Villemur family kept it until 2018, when it passed to the town of Ax and its 1900-era furniture was sold at auction.
The manor is not open to visitors: it passed to the town hall of Ax-les-Thermes in 2018 and its 1900-era furniture was auctioned that same year. It stands on a hillside north of the spa town, behind dense trees, so it is seen from outside only. In 2019 a high-end hotel was proposed for part of its wooded park.
The manor is heated by thermal water, a detail tied to Ax-les-Thermes' spa activity. Its rooms include some with ceilings 3.8 metres high, and the building covers 770 m² over four floors. The original French gardens were later replaced by a wooded park.
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