Château de Chambord

I remember rounding the last bend of the tree-lined drive and just stopping the car for a second, because I genuinely thought I was seeing double. Chambord doesn’t reveal itself gradually the way some châteaux do — it just erupts out of the forest, towers and chimneys and lantern domes stacked on top of each other like someone tried to fit an entire village onto one roof. Lia laughed at me because I’d been talking about this place for months, ever since a friend in Blois told us it was “not like the others,” and I still wasn’t ready for it. Francis I started building this as a hunting lodge in 1519. A hunting lodge. I kept repeating that to myself as we walked toward the entrance, trying to square the word with the scale of what was in front of us.

Inside, the thing everyone talks about is the double-helix staircase, and it earns the hype. Two spirals wind around a single open core, so two people can climb and descend at the same time and never actually meet, just catch glimpses of each other through the stone lattice. We spent a ridiculous amount of time going up one side and down the other just to wave at each other through the gaps like kids. The design is so clever that it’s long been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, who was living just up the road in Amboise at the time and died the same year construction began. Nobody can prove he drew it, but standing in that stairwell, it’s hard not to believe it.

What stuck with me most, though, was climbing up to the rooftop terrace and looking out. From up there, among the towers and carved chimneys, you finally understand the roofline that looked so chaotic from the ground — it’s practically a second building, a whole skyline of stone meant to be walked through, not just admired from below. And then you look past it to the forest, and it just keeps going. Chambord sits inside a walled game park of over 5,400 hectares, the largest enclosed forest in Europe, and even from the terrace you can’t see where it ends. It took 28 years and thousands of workers to build all of this, and Francis I apparently only stayed here a handful of times in his life. I found that oddly moving — this obsessive, decades-long project that its own patron barely used.

We ended the afternoon sitting by the moat with sandwiches from a boulangerie in Blois, watching the towers change color as the light dropped. Lia said it looked less like a house and more like a question someone had asked in stone. I don’t have a better way to put it than that.

When to go: We went in September and had long stretches of the rooftop almost to ourselves — late spring works just as well, with milder weather and a fraction of the summer crowds that pack the courtyard by midday.