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Marie-Antoinette entrusted her architect Richard Mique with the construction of a rustic Hamlet, which was very fashionable in the last quarter of the 18th century. Undoubtedly inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories of returning to nature, this small village of twelve Norman style houses with neat interiors revolves around a lake and has a small farm where people cultivated, ploughed, fished, etc… "The pleasure of visiting all the buildings in the hamlet, seeing the cows being milked, fishing in the lake, enchanted the Queen ", wrote Mrs Campan, first lady’s maid of Marie-Antoinette.

The Queen’s House is the central building of this theatrical composition. It is made up of two separate houses connected by a wooden gallery: to the South, the actual “Queen’s House” and to the North, the House used for the Billiard room. Today it has a particularly degraded external appearance due to the fragility of its materials and very dilapidated interiors, deprived of their decors and which cannot be opened to the public. A complete programme of structural restorations must therefore be undertaken as a matter of urgency, nearly a century after the last renovation campaign carried out in the 1930s, thanks to Donation Rockefeller financing.

Estimated budget: 4,500,000 euros