 The château, along with a new model village ( "new town"), was built at the order of Richelieu, who had spent his youth there and bought the village of his ancestors; he had the estate raised to a "duché-pairie" in August 1631.He engaged the architect Jacques Lemercier, who had designed the Sorbonne and the Cardinal's "hôtel" in Paris, the Palais Cardinal (now the Palais-Royal).With the permission of King Louis XIII, Richelieu created from scratch a walled town on a grid arrangement, and, enclosing within its precincts the modest home of his childhood, an adjacent palace (the Château de Richelieu proper) surrounded by an ornamental moat and large imposing walls enclosing a series of entrance courts towards the town and, on the opposite side, grand axially-planned formal vista gardens of parterres and gravel walks, a central circular fountain, and views reaching to an exedra cut in the surrounding trees and pierced by an avenue in the woodlands extending to the horizon.