Notes from the Loire Valley: What Makes a Place Feel Like Home

There’s something that begins to shift when you spend time in the châteaux of the Loire Valley in France.

At first, it’s easy to focus on their beauty — the scale, the symmetry, the feeling that everything was built to impress. Chambord, especially, feels almost like a re-imagined Disney dream in stone, something grand and striking, yet strangely very cavernous and unreal. And then you arrive somewhere like Cheverny, where the atmosphere is soft, lived in, and you begin to sense something different… something that feels more natural, more inhabited and warm.

Walking through these spaces in the Loire Valley, I found myself thinking less about the architecture and more about all the lives that moved through them. Because even here, home was never just one place.

The French royalty and entourage traveled from château to château during the French Renaissance, sometimes staying for long stretches, other times passing through only briefly, building new spaces, leaving others behind, returning again when it suited the moment and trend of the year! Some of these places held generations of memory, while others were used only occasionally, more like a monument to grandeur than a permanent home. And yet, each one still carries traces of what happened there, layers of lived experience that remain long after the people themselves have gone.

It made me reflect on my own sense of home, especially as it continues to shift and change, especially recently. Mine doesn’t resemble a château in any way, and it doesn’t always stay in one place (hello this last 5 years!) It moves between cities, and different chapters of life, sometimes rooted in a familiar space and other times just for a temporary taste of the what ifs. What I’ve come to realize is that home has very little to do with how something looks, it’s shaped instead by what happens within it… the conversations - frivolous or deep, the parties and milestones, the everyday, and of course the people we share those moments with, whether for years or only briefly. That is what gives a place its depth and its warmth, what makes it feel like something we belong to, even if only for a time.

In that way, even the grandest château is not so different from the spaces we create in our own lives. They were lived in, moved through, returned to, and sometimes left behind, just as we do. And perhaps that’s the reminder they offer. That home is not something fixed or singular, but something we continue to create, again and again, wherever we find ourselves.

A little reflection: Think of a place that felt like home to you, even for a short time. What made it feel that way?

“On emporte toujours un peu de chez soi avec soi.” (We always carry a piece of home with us.)

Print & “Color-Your-Own” Postcard

Here is your very own printable postcard of Chenonceau in the Loire Valley as a reminder of what home may be to you and to offer you a moment of creativity.