Nemours Estate

Alfred I. du Pont was one of three young du Pont cousins who took over the family's aging gunpowder company in 1902 and rebuilt it into a modern giant. He was a gifted, restless man, partly deaf from years around the powder works, and his personal life put him at odds with much of the family, especially after his divorce and remarriage caused a rift.

Nemours was born partly out of that rift. Alfred built the estate in the years around 1910 as a home for his second wife and a statement to relatives who had turned against him. He is said to have surrounded it with a high wall, so the story goes, to keep out those he no longer wished to see. Whatever the truth of the legend, the estate carries the mark of a proud man determined to build something magnificent on his own terms.

The mansion is modeled on the great houses of France, a formal chateau of many rooms filled with European and American fine and decorative art, tapestries, rare antiques, and furnishings gathered over a lifetime. It was equipped with the most modern conveniences of its day, and behind the grandeur was a smoothly run household of remarkable comfort.

The estate reaches beyond the house as well, into garages of vintage automobiles, workrooms, and the machinery that kept a self-contained world running. Together they show a way of life at the very top of American wealth in the early twentieth century, preserved as it was left.

The formal gardens at Nemours are the estate's crowning glory, laid out on a grand central axis that runs from the mansion out across terraces, pools, and fountains toward a distant horizon. Modeled on the gardens of French royalty, they are among the largest formal French gardens on the continent, a landscape of symmetry, water, and long green vistas.

The central reflecting pool, lined with jets of water, leads the eye to a gilded statue called Achievement, glinting at the far end of the view. Statuary, colonnades, and clipped plantings carry the design outward, and the whole composition is meant to impress, to make a visitor feel the sweep and order of a European royal garden translated to Delaware soil.

Nemours belongs to the beautiful Brandywine Valley, a rolling country of woods, streams, and estate gardens on the edge of Wilmington. Spring is a spectacular time here, when the gardens fill with bulbs and blossom and the fountains run, and summer keeps the beds lush and green.

Autumn brings turning color to the surrounding hardwoods and a softer light across the terraces, one of the loveliest times to walk the grounds. In the cold months the estate quiets down, the fountains stilled and the beds bare, and the chateau stands stark and grand above its sleeping gardens.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.