Château de Saché

The barn of the Château de Saché can be hired for company seminars, team-building days and gala evenings, with furniture for about 120 seated guests and a small stage. The château, in the village of Saché in Touraine, houses the Musée Balzac, so a working day here can include a visit of the rooms where the novelist stayed and wrote.

Seminars and company events

The museum rents its barn by the full day or the half day, under a rental agreement signed with the organiser. The day can be run by the company itself, by the museum's mediators or by outside providers working on site. The mediators offer guided presentations of the house and its collections, creative workshops in modelling, writing, cyanotype or printing, and slower formats: a literary walk, a coffee tasting and what the museum calls a Balzacian nap, a nod to the writer's long nights of work. An investigation game and a hike also appear in the group offer. These activities fit well between two working sessions, for example a plenary in the morning and a workshop in the house after lunch. A quote is prepared for each request, and the team can combine the hire of the barn with a guided visit for the whole group.

Rooms and capacities

The event space is a single room, the barn, of 150 m². It comes with 10 tables, 120 chairs and 30 deckchairs, a 12 m² stage and wifi, and it can be heated in winter. An adjoining space is used to store meal trays. The museum does not publish capacities by layout, so a theatre or cabaret plan should be confirmed with the team according to the furniture supplied. The museum is open from 10:00 to 12:30 and from 13:30 to 18:00, and these hours frame the visits that can be added to a seminar day.

Catering

There is no kitchen on site. Meals are brought in by an outside caterer, with the adjoining room used to hold the trays, or the group walks to a restaurant in the village. For a gala evening the caterer works from its own equipment, which should be part of the brief when asking for quotes.

History and setting

Balzac stayed at Saché about ten times between 1825 and 1848, as the guest of the owner, Jean Margonne, a friend of his family. He worked here on parts of Le Père Goriot, Louis Lambert, César Birotteau and Illusions perdues, and the Indre valley below the château gave him the setting of Le Lys dans la vallée. He described the house as a refuge where he could work as if in a monastery. The museum now holds about 2,300 items: manuscripts, drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, photographs, furniture and printing equipment. It carries the Musée de France and Maison des Illustres labels, and the château is a classified historic monument. The old woods around the estate, where Balzac took long walks, are still part of the setting and lend themselves to the literary walks offered to groups.

Getting there

The address is 4 rue du Château, 37190 Saché. The village lies in the Indre valley, south-west of Tours and a few kilometres from Azay-le-Rideau. Azay-le-Rideau has a station on the line from Tours to Chinon, and Saint-Pierre-des-Corps handles TGV services from Paris. For a group, a coach or cars remain the practical option, and the museum can give directions for the final approach.