How to Rent a Chateau in the Dordogne for a Week with Your Group
If you have ever looked into renting a chateau in France for a week, you will know the usual version: an empty house handed over with a set of keys, a pool, and a long list of things to arrange yourself. There is another way to do it, and it suits a certain kind of group better. Rent a chateau in the Dordogne where the house comes with people who live there, who cook, and who know the region & local vendors well enough to shape your days around whatever you have come to do.
That is what we offer at Château de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a 16th-century house in the Périgord Vert given over, for a week at a time, to a single group. Five hundred years of stone, a handful of bedrooms, a garden that runs down towards the fields, and a household that runs the week with you rather than leaving you to it. Two groups from the past year show what that looks like in practice.
A crochet circle from Dublin takes the whole house
A crochet circle from Dublin settled in for a week last May, came back for another in September, and has booked the same two weeks again for the year ahead. Each time the salons became something between a workshop and a very relaxed common room. Skeins everywhere, patterns passed hand to hand across the long table, the steady companionable quiet a room full of people working with their hands makes, broken by laughter and the occasional held-up piece for the others to admire.
They worked where the day dictated. The comfortable lawn furniture, under the shade of Algerian spruces planted by a former owner, is a great place to start the day after pastries from the boulangerie just steps away. The salons face west, so the working light holds late into the afternoon. The beginners stayed with simple objects, the repeated shapes that quietly build technique, while the more practised worked through complicated bag patterns that need a practiced guide to build the foundation. All of it under the eye of an instructor who can spot a dropped loop across the width of a room and say so before it becomes a problem three rows later.
Sprinkled through the week, they discovered Dordogne. In May that meant the Floralies flower festival at Saint-Jean-de-Côle, one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France ("Prettiest Villages in France"), its medieval streets given over to growers and blooms. In September it was Brantôme, the Venice of the Périgord, for a slower day along the banks of the Dronne beneath the old abbey, complete with riverside picnic, watching adventurous kayakers shoot the sluice of the old mill. And in both weeks, the pleasures of French cuisine at the table each evening, the day's stitching set aside for dinner cooked for the group and served together. Sometimes prepared by your hosts, sometimes by a professional chef, and one night down at the local restaurant just a few hundred metres away.
A group of authors gathers to work and collaborate
A different week, a different reason to take the house. This time a group of authors working in the same genre, brought together by a fellow author among them who wanted a week where the whole group could work in one place. Not a course and not a conference, simply the people and the time and a house with room enough to spread out.
Writing is solitary until the moment it helps enormously not to be, and the house holds both halves of that. There are the quiet corners for the hours that need silence, and for the hours that go better with company, the group drew together in front of the ornately carved fireplace in the main reception room. They wrote through the mornings, walked the lanes around Saint-Germain-des-Prés when a sentence refused to come, and gathered again over dinner to talk through the day's work with people who understood exactly what it had cost.
The table is where the week comes together
Both groups found the same thing, which is that the day's work matters more when there is a proper table to bring it back to. We run the house as a table d'hôtes, so dinner is a set menu cooked for the group and served together at one long table, the whole party eating as one rather than scattering to separate plans. It is among the oldest ideas in French hospitality and still one of the best. The making happens all day, in ones and twos and quiet corners. The evening is when the group becomes a group again.
We know the area, and we help you shape the week
A week here is yours to fill, and most groups want a day or two out in the Dordogne between working sessions. This is where knowing the place well earns its keep. There is the Thursday market at Excideuil beneath the walls of its medieval château, the golden stone of Sarlat, the painted caves at Lascaux, and the villages classified among the Plus Beaux Villages de France within an easy drive. If your group wants a vineyard afternoon, a private tasting, professional chefs on site, or a guided day among the châteaux of the valley, we can point you to the right people and help you arrange it.
We advise; you book. Everything beyond the house itself, the tastings and guides and tables at restaurants, you arrange and pay for directly with the people providing it. What we offer is the knowledge of who is worth your time, built over years of living here, so the days you spend away from the château are as considered as the ones you spend in it.
Take the house for a week
A craft circle, a group of writers, a book club that has always said it should do something like this, a handful of friends who paint. If your group makes something, or wants a week to finally start, the house is built for exactly this. The Château Set is our name for a week like these ones: five friends, five bedrooms, five nights, the whole house and its household yours to work in. Take a look at what a week with your people could be.
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