The château was first built as a medieval fortress, and then rebuilt on the medieval buildings' remains in 1768 for the conseiller du roi Jean Delpech. The 1768 phase was provided with modest formal gardens formed as regular parterres
1786-1796
The château and its park in the French gardening style were bought in 1784 as the last of his country houses by the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde, one of the richest financiers of the Ancien Régime, after his neighbours gave him the chance to do so. On this marshy land he decided to rebuild the château and create a large landscape park to his own taste. To this end he commissioned major artists such as Bélanger, the famous cabinetmaker Leleu, the sculptorAugustin Pajou and the painter Claude Joseph Vernet. In 1786, after the new pont des roches subsided, and Bélanger's plans were threatening to prove too expensive even for the marquis. Bélanger was thus sacked as chief architect in May that year and replaced by Hubert Robert, though Bélanger remained onsite for the construction of the circular temple of filial piety. The following year, 1787, in some of the most exceptional hydrographic work of the period, the re-routing of the Juine took a long time to achieve. Next, an entirely new type of structure was built on a small island in the centre of the main lake - a rostral column, in honour of the marquis' two young sons Edouard and Ange Auguste, news of whose disappearance had arrived in France earlier that year. They had died young at sea in Lituya Bay during the La Pérouse expedition. The park is in the marquis' own image, showing his admiration for navigation and discovery, his love of nature and beautiful plants, and his memory of his youth in the Basque and the mountainous Pyrénées. It also shows off his riches, with bridges "aux boules d'or", grottoes adorned with thousands of pieces of gold leaf or precious and semi-precious stones, and above all a pebble-paved road which gives the park such a great cachet. The construction took ten years and nearly 700 workers, of which a large majority were specialist craftsmen. Robert transformed into a landscape of open meadow and belts of trees contained within a wide bowl, which became dotted with eye-catching features with a few years. Chateaubriand called the result an oasis. In its return to nature or at least to the illusion of nature, the park's style can be described as Romantic, though it also contains elements of "anglo-chinois".
