A directory built by a builder.
Le Roi du Château is published by Meijer Projectontwikkeling B.V. in Leiden, the Netherlands, and edited by Duije Pieter Meijer — a third-generation builder.
What this is
Information about European châteaux is scattered across national heritage registers, encyclopaedias, estate agents and long-abandoned enthusiast sites. Le Roi du Château gathers it into one archive with a single, consistent format: 6,665 records at present, each built from public registers and each citing its source.
What this is not
This directory records facts: where a building stands, which centuries its recorded building campaigns belong to, how it is protected, whether it can be visited, and where its official information lives. It does not rate, rank, value or assess the condition of any building, and it carries no reviews. A listing here is a record, not a recommendation.
Where the knowledge goes instead
The construction side of this project lives in the Journal and the Glossary: how a slate roof is built and how it fails, how tuffeau differs from granite, what classé and inscrit actually oblige an owner to do. That is written in general terms, about how buildings of this kind work — never about a particular property.
Sources and corrections
French records come from the Base Mérimée of the Ministère de la Culture, published under the Licence Ouverte (Etalab), enriched with Wikidata (CC0) and images from Wikimedia Commons under their individual licences. Every record names its sources at the foot of the page.
Registers contain errors, and a record is only as good as the register it comes from. Every record has a Suggest a correction button; corrections go to a moderation queue and are checked against the source before anything changes.