A closed-off presidential apartment at the Château de Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, opens to visitors on 1 July 2026 — and it's frozen in time. The suite of rooms, kept much as President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing left them, was the setting for the first G6 summit in November 1975, when the leaders of six industrial powers sat down together for the very first time.
Rambouillet is a strange and storied place. It's the only French château to have been a royal residence, an imperial retreat and a presidential home all at once. Kings and emperors loved it for the hunting forest around it and the easy escape from Paris — Louis XVI, Napoleon and the restoration monarchs all spent time here, and it stayed an official residence of French presidents right up until 2018.
That long run as a backdrop to power produced some remarkable moments. De Gaulle met Eisenhower there in 1959, Brezhnev signed the Franco-Russian accords in 1977, and Nelson Mandela walked the gardens with Jacques Chirac in 1996. In all, the château hosted more than 130 international meetings, its quiet forest setting apparently making hard diplomacy feel a little softer.
The 1975 G6 summit is the star of the new visit route. Giscard had the château renovated in a matter of days so that Gerald Ford, Helmut Schmidt, Harold Wilson, Aldo Moro and Takeo Miki could relax in 18th-century style with modern comfort while hashing out the future of the western economy. The Centre des monuments nationaux has now opened 250 square metres of previously off-limits space — antechambers, bedrooms, boudoirs and galleries — as part of a tour marking a century of French diplomacy. Visitors get a 25-page room-by-room guide, archive footage on screens, and recorded interviews with witnesses including Giscard's son Louis-Valéry, former ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet, and the president's steward Walter Lutringer.
The opening completes a longer restoration. Napoleon's apartment and five guest rooms reopened in 2023 after the Élysée handed the château fully over to the monuments authority in 2018. With this July's launch, the entire building becomes accessible for the first time.
For travellers, the practical side is simple: the new apartment is included in the standard discovery ticket (€11) or the grand tour (€13), with opening hours of 10am–1pm and 2pm–6.30pm from April to September (afternoons end at 5pm in winter). Online booking is recommended, and the château sits within easy reach of Paris — a handy half-day trip for anyone who's done the usual Versailles circuit and wants something quieter with genuine political history attached.
