Château de Villersexel

The current château was built after a fire in 1871 during the Battle of Villersexel (Franco-Prussian War). Construction took 5 years (1882-1887), overseen by architect Eugène Gustave Danjoy. An earlier medieval castle, built in the early Middle Ages, was destroyed around the year 1000. A second building, long owned by the Grammont family, also failed to survive the Franco-Prussian War — only a crenellated tower remains of it. The current château combines white stone and red brick, with a Louis XIII-inspired facade and alternating stone colonnades recalling the royal saltworks of Arc-et-Senans.

Today the property operates as a bed-and-breakfast within the château, where the owning baron himself acts as host — it also offers guided tours and event room rentals (25-150 people).

The château's documented sequence of three successive buildings on the same site — a medieval castle destroyed around 1000, a Grammont-era building lost to the Franco-Prussian War, and the current 1882-1887 château — gives Villersexel an unusually well-traced architectural lineage across nearly a millennium.

The survival of the current owning family as personal hosts, rather than a hired hospitality staff, gives Villersexel a genuinely aristocratic guest experience distinct from professionally managed château-hotels.

The facade's deliberate visual echo of the royal saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a UNESCO World Heritage site, ties Villersexel's 1880s design to one of the era's most celebrated architectural references.

The château's position in Villersexel, Haute-Saône, gives guests staying here access to Besançon and the wider Franche-Comté region.