Directly across the road from the Château de Chambord, François I's most extravagant act of architectural ego, sits a modest two-storey manor whose creamy rendered facade and slate mansard roof make it look, by comparison, almost apologetic. The Relais de Chambord was carved from this former post house and hunting lodge — a building that has served travellers pausing before the château since the eighteenth century — and reopened in 2018 after a thorough renovation that brought Christophe Tollemer's interior design sensibility to bear on its 55 rooms. His approach holds genuine tension in check: the building's classical bones are preserved while the interiors push toward a contemporary sharpness, the orange-lacquered window frames visible from the garden terrace announcing that no attempt at period pastiche will be made. Inside, that clarity of intent carries through every room. Large-format photographic wallpapers — a Gothic spire fragment in the attic rooms, bare winter trees in the lower floors — serve as headboards, grounding beds dressed in crimson velvet throws against otherwise spare white walls and wide-plank oak floors. The bar's original oak boiserie panelling, dark and deeply gridded, absorbs low lamp light, while the restaurant pivots toward something brighter: houndstooth barrel chairs surrounding white-clothed tables beneath a branching Heracleum chandelier by Moooi. The Loire Valley outside provides the finest produce on the plate; the building handles everything else.

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