Sold. The castle of the Giscard d'Estaing family in Chanonat (Puy-de-Dôme), on sale for 16 years, has been sold to an Auvergne buyer, announced on Monday the Clermont-Ferrand real estate agency which carried out the transaction. The Château de Varvasse, around 1,000 square meters on nearly 14 hectares of land, was sold for between 1 and 1.5 million euros, half of its initial price set at 2.9 million euros in 2004 , said Jacques Estève, director of the agency Estève Immobilier, confirming information from the daily La Montagne.
The deed of sale was signed on February 5 and the buyer "is a fifty-something Auvergne, very humble, very simple, who wishes to remain anonymous," said Jacques Estève, who has known the Giscard d'Estaing family for many years . "I had explained to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 2006 that it would be difficult to sell above two million euros but as a good Auvergnat, he did not want to go down," he joked.
The family refused several buyers. A compromise had been signed with a Dutchman in 2008 through another agency but had failed. "We had a client in Dubai interested in 1.7 million which she had refused. The president would have liked very much to sell to an African ”, detailed Jacques Estève.
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The new buyer "fell in love with the castle after the first visit in October and the compromise was signed on November 5," he added. According to him, the former president was "fascinated" by this Auvergnat who had told him of his wish to install an educational farm on the estate. "He initially wants to develop guest rooms and live in part of the castle" but the work to be done to restore it and maintenance represent "400,000 to 500,000 euros" additional, estimated the real estate agent .
The father of the former president, Edmond Giscard d'Estaing, had acquired the house in 1936, "the year my father opened his real estate agency," said the agent. "The story is beautiful since 84 years later, I allow him to sell it," he congratulates himself.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, president of the regional council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004, came two to three times a week with his wife and their children at the time. He also welcomed prestigious guests "as a friend," she said: the American diplomat Henry Kissinger, the German chancellor Helmut Kohlet and even Nicolas Sarkozy, during the presidential campaign in 2007. That year, the Château de Varvasse was put up for sale. The estate, located on a lava flow which overlooks the Auzon river, has been included in the additional inventory of Historic Monuments since 1995.