From lodge to apartment
Half-day workshopParticipants: maximum of 30 pupils
Levels: Ages 9-15.
Times: 9.30am-12pm or 1.30pm-4pm
Price: €110
After defining the types of accommodation and naming the rooms, furniture and decoration of the houses, pupils study the development of the château’s various lodges, dating from the 16th to the 18th century. They then reconstitute models of rooms from the different periods.
Sequence 1: Presentation
With participants as a classroom group, the workshop leader presents the major periods of the monument’s occupation by the kings of France or their guests: the temporary, nomadic life of the 16th century, then the more settled and continuous occupation of the 18th.Discussion leads to the naming of rooms in the various types of accommodation and consideration of what they were used for, and to pupils imagining exactly what court life must have been like in a royal château.
Sequence 2: Inventory
In groups, and with the help of appropriate teaching aids, pupils take a look at the first floors of the various lodges and apartments, their goal being to draw up an inventory of decoration and furniture, taking into account the different original fixtures and fittings, and what they had to offer in terms of comfort.
Sequence 3: Models
Back in the classroom, pupils are asked to work on models with scaled down room volumes, and to reconstitute the decoration and furniture layout they would have had in the periods concerned.
By so doing, they bring to life the principles of room layout and decoration that lay behind the development of 16th-century lodges into 18th-century apartments.
