Château Pastré 1.88

The Château Pastré, formerly known as the Chateau de Montredon, is a nineteenth-century building in the suburb of Montredon to the south of Marseille, France. Originally the property of a wealthy merchant family, as of 2012 it housed the Faïence pottery museum, the Musée de la Faïence de Marseille. The grounds of the chateau are a public park.FoundationEugène Pastré (1806–1868) and his wife Céline de Beaulincourt-Marle (1825-1900) belonged to a wealthy family of Marseille shipowners and merchants. Between 1836 and 1853 the Pastré family accumulated of land between Pointe Rouge and the Grotte Rolland in the south of Marseille, which they made into a park. The natural vegetation would have been scrub, Aleppo pines, oaks, laurel and juniper. Before the Canal de Marseille was constructed to this point, the family had to go to great lengths to obtain water, with which they irrigated and created lawns in the lower levels with gardens of vines, cereals and orchards of almonds, figs and apricot. The Pastrés had three large houses built in the park between 1845 and 1865: the Château Estrangin, Château Pastré and Château Sanderval.BuildingThe Parisian architect Jean-Charles Danjoy designed the Château Pastré, the largest of the buildings, completed in 1862. The three-story building was designed to meet the needs of its owners for a place where they could hold entertainments for many people. The Nouvelle Revue in its gossip section Chronique de L'Élégance in 1884 described a play being presented at the home of Mme Pastre.