Chateau d'Argenteuil

Count Ferdinand de Meeûs, owner of the Argenteuil estate, began the construction of a castle in 1837. The work was completed in 1847, but the castle was immediately ravaged by fire. The only known view of it is the painting of Ferdinand de Meeûs' family painted by Fanny Geefs before the fire.

A new castle was built on the same site between 1856 and 1858 under the direction of the architect Jean-Pierre Cluysenaar. See photo opposite. The landscaping of the park was entrusted to the landscape architect Edouard Keilig. This French Renaissance style building housed the Scandinavian School Queen Astrid from 1973 to 2016 and, since its closure, the European School of Brussels-Argenteuil. After the death of Ferdinand de Meeûs, his wife took over the property. Her will is very clear; her unmarried daughter Henriette (1838-1907) took over the castle and its park, everything it contained with the exception of certain carefully described objects. Upon her death in 1907, she chose the Meeûs-Martini couple to succeed her. In 1937 and 1938, two royal decrees granted the Counts de Meeûs and their descendants the right to add the name of Argenteuil to their surname. The fate of the second castle and its park, resulting from the dismantling of the Meeûs property, is somewhat different. Acquired by S.A. Domaine d'Argenteuil, belonging to the Bernheim family, it was ceded to Carmelite nuns who, in return, agreed to hand over their properties around the Sacred Heart church in rue Vanderkindere in Uccle. However, finding this new dwelling unsuitable, the Carmelite nuns accepted the proposal of Baron Paul de Launoit (nl) to build them a new convent at his expense but on his own land on a three-hectare plot nearby. In 1937, it was therefore the Compagnie mobilière et immobilière liégeoise (COMIL), of which Barons Paul and Arsène de Launoit were the main shareholders, that owned the Meeûs castle and its park. After the Second World War, the Belgian State acquired the castle, which housed the Normal Institute of Agricultural Home Economics and ISTI, then in 1992 sold it to the Queen Astrid International School (en).

The descendants of Count Louis Meeûs divided the estate into several parts, which they resold. In 1929, an American businessman, William Hallam Tuck, successively bought two parts of the estate (for a total of 143 hectares 59 ares 11 centiares), without the Meeûs castle which at the time belonged to the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Uccle. William Tuck had a manor house built there to reside during the summer season. The New York architect William Adams Delano (en) designed the plans. This manor house (see photo), considered the third Argenteuil castle, originally named "Bellevue" castle by its first owner or Tuck castle, is the one that from 1961 housed the second family of King Leopold III and therefore became the Royal Domain of Argenteuil.

On June 1, 1949, William Tuck sold his estate to the Belgian State, which acquired it on behalf of the Belgian National Railway Company (SNCB). In 1951, at the initiative of Prime Minister Joseph Pholien, a law granted the enjoyment of the Argenteuil estate to Prince Charles of Belgium, Count of Flanders, to thank him for having served as regent of the kingdom from 1944 to 1950. But he soon renounced this endowment. The castle was then fitted out to accommodate distinguished guests visiting the 1958 Universal Exhibition. In 1960, Count Ludovic de Meeûs d'Argenteuil sold thirty hectares of the ancestral domain to the Berlaymont nuns who were leaving Brussels, their convent and the vast private park adjoining it being expropriated by the Belgian State to erect the headquarters of the European administration (what was then called the Common Market). The European headquarters has since been known as Berlaymont, a name it received in reference to the former religious owners, the Dames de Berlaymont. They set up their new convent and their boarding school for young girls in the vast park they were able to buy in Argenteuil with the proceeds of the expropriation.

In 1961, King Leopold III left the Royal Castle of Laeken with his second family to settle in Argenteuil. The king's installation in the domain required modifications to the castle and its outbuildings, which were undertaken by the Ministry of Public Works at the beginning of 1960. The royal couple and their children resided there until the death of Princess of Réthy in June 2002. For more than forty years, there were two royal courts in Belgium, that of Laeken and that of Argenteuil. In Argenteuil, the royal couple enjoyed receiving many personalities from the literary, scientific, cultural, and academic worlds. It was also in these premises that the Princess Lilian Cardiology Foundation held its colloquia. In April 2003, by decision of the Belgian government, Argenteuil Castle was stripped of traces of its former royal residents, before being put up for sale by the federal public service Finances. On September 25, 2004, the domain was bought by Jean-Marie Delwart, a business leader passionate about ethology. At the time, it had been suggested that the domain be made available to the European Union to become the residence of a future European president in the event that the union's constitution, then in preparation, had provided for the creation, at the top of a possible European confederation, of a presidential post (in reference to the president of the United States or, at least, the president of the Swiss Confederation). On another plot of the domain, Baron de Launoit had the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel built by the architect Yvan Renchon.

List of Belgian castles by region Convent of the Dames de Berlaymont