Vaux-le-Vicomte Entry Ticket: State Rooms, Basement Kitchens, Coach Museum

Around 40 minutes from Paris stands the château that Versailles was answering. Vaux-le-Vicomte was finished first, and the design of the larger palace took its cues from it.

The ticket opens the whole house rather than a circuit of the best rooms. The state rooms and the private apartments are the obvious part. The library is quieter. The basement kitchens are the ones worth the detour: the machinery of a 17th-century household, the vaulted rooms where the food for the famous parties was actually cooked, several floors below the people it was cooked for. The Coach Museum is in the outbuildings, with the vehicles that made an estate this far from Paris possible in the first place.

Outside, 33 hectares of formal gardens by André Le Nôtre, and forest around them. Le Nôtre built the perspective here before he built it at Versailles, and the trick still works: from the terrace the far end of the garden looks close, and it takes a long walk to prove otherwise.

The visit runs at your own pace.