Why Château de Séailles will not be an event venue
For a time we hoped to open our 17th-century stone Orangery as a venue. This page used to present that: restored as a hall for gatherings, which we had expected to open in the summer of 2027. We have decided not to go ahead, and we would rather explain why here than quietly take the page down.
The reason is the valley. Séailles sits in a fold of the Gers where the quiet is the first thing almost every visitor remarks on. What we came to understand is that the same landscape that holds that quiet also carries sound extraordinarily well. Voices, music at ten in the evening — from our lovely ridgetop they all travel out across the fields and up the facing slopes, and arrive in kitchens and bedrooms kilometres away. It is a matter of the shape of the land, and for a south-facing building no arrangement of speakers, no curfew and no amount of goodwill would change it. And keeping guests inside a soundproofed hall with the doors and windows shut for the whole of a party is not realistic.
Our neighbours have lived and farmed in this valley far longer than we have been in it. The peace here is theirs before it is ours, and we are not willing to trade it for anything that would disturb it.
So, plainly: Château de Séailles is not and will not be a wedding or party events business. We have never taken bookings, and do not propose to accept bookings, for weddings or large parties in the Orangery or elsewhere on the property. If you have arrived here from an older listing, a search result or a saved link suggesting otherwise, that information is out of date, and we are sorry for the confusion.
What we do offer is the gîte: a three-bedroom holiday house for up to eight people, with the salt-water pool, the walled courtyard, six hectares of park and woodland — and the quiet that all of this was really about.
The Shefer family
Château de Séailles, September 2026