Our Fantasy Photoshoot Retreats are intimate, seven-night experiences in our home, Château du Puy Vidal.
Within the warmth and safety of that shared atmosphere, you are invited to open up, explore, and become the protagonist of your own fantasy story through guided embodiment exercises, costume, styling, creative direction, and private fine-art portrait sessions created especially for you.
We offer several distinct fantasy retreat themes each year, each shaped by a different photographer, story, and creative vision.
Different worlds. Distinct invitations. One philosophy. Whether you are called toward medieval legends, romantic heroines, or darker myths, each retreat invites you to inhabit a different story through costume, photography, art, and imagination.
Fantasy is not about escaping your life. It is about understanding it more deeply.
Femme Noire is a new journey at Puy Vidal this year, inviting you to enter the dark feminine—the part of you that lives in shadow, storm, instinct, and truth.
Photographer Ida von Aves guides you to explore beauty and sorrow, fury and softness, endings and rebirth—giving form to this inner journey through three cinematic portraits: Black, White, and Red.
You may love this if…
You are drawn to gothic beauty, feminine archetypes, emotional depth, and transformation—and to giving space to the powerful parts of yourself that are rarely seen.
Explore Femme Noire
Discover where wildness and romance live side by side. Led by photographer Vanessa Bussoletti, this is a week to explore three versions of yourself: the Wild Maiden, the radiant Sovereign Queen, and the beautifully Haunted Romantic.
You may love this if…
You are drawn to sweeping romance, literary heroines and natural landscapes
Explore The Romantic Heroine
THE RETREAT
What Shapes Your Week
Seven Nights at Puy Vidal
Stay with us inside the historic walls of our 13th-century home, with time to settle into the rhythm, beauty, and atmosphere of château life.
Private Fine-Art Portrait Sessions
Work one-on-one with an internationally renowned fantasy photographer to create cinematic portraits shaped around your character, story, and chosen world.
Costume, Hair & Makeup
Step into a carefully curated wardrobe, with professional styling and—on selected retreats—hair and makeup designed around the era, archetype, or myth you are exploring.
A Circle of Kindred Spirits
Share the week with a small group of women drawn to the same world of beauty, myth, and imagination—gathering, witnessing, laughing, and creating together.
Banquets, Play & Evening Gatherings
Candlelit dinners, themed banquets, games, film nights, mysteries, and moments of play allow the world of the retreat to continue long after the camera is put away.
Guided Embodiment
Through embodiment exercises, archetypal exploration, and creative direction, you are supported in moving beyond posing and fully inhabiting your character.
WHY WE BUILT THIS
We believe imagination deserves a place in adult life.
A Fantasy Retreat at the Lady of the Chateau is an invitation to cross the threshold between the ordinary world and the realm of imagination. As children, we entered imaginary worlds instinctively; as adults, many of us slowly forget. Yet stories and myths have always helped us understand who we are, giving shape to courage, longing, transformation, and the parts of ourselves that everyday life rarely gives us space to inhabit.
Our Fantasy Retreats are week-long journeys that seem to exist outside modern life. Here, time expands as fantasy photography, historical costume, embodiment, shared banquets, and play come together. You do not simply pose for a camera; you step into an archetype and encounter yourself with greater imagination and possibility.
This is invitation to remember the parts of yourself that live within you.
THE EXPERIENCE
Step into
Chateau de Puy Vidal
Built in the 13th century and reshaped during the Renaissance, Château de Puy Vidal is a world of ancient towers, hidden passages, candlelit rooms, dungeons, gardens, and a labyrinth waiting beyond the doors. More than the setting for the retreat, our home becomes part of the story, a living place where time feels suspended and imagination can fully awaken.
Our People
Who Is This For?
CHÂTEAU DE PUY VIDAL
A world waiting to be inhabited
A Glimpse into our world
Echoes of the Experience
Dearest Dreamers,
Before there were retreats…
Before there was Lady of the Château…
There was simply a family who never believed imagination belonged only to childhood. Julia and her sister Penelope grew up in a home where books were treasured, art supplies were never in short supply, and stories were treated as places to enter rather than simply observe. Their parents, Maruca and Robert, believed beauty, creativity, and curiosity were not distractions from life, but essential ways of living it. Together, they built imaginary worlds, made little films, dressed up in costumes, and dreamed endlessly about places that felt touched by history and wonder.
For Julia, one dream never faded. At just fourteen years old, she became captivated by the idea of living in an ancient French château—not as a symbol of grandeur, but as a place where beauty, creativity, and community could flourish. While most childhood dreams quietly disappear, this one only grew stronger with time.
Years later, Julia met Carolina on a film set. What brought them together wasn’t simply a love story. It was a shared belief that stories have the power to transform us. They both longed to create a life where people could step inside the worlds that had once inspired them as children.
When they finally found Château de Puy Vidal, it wasn’t the beginning of the dream. It was the moment a twenty-year-old dream found its home. With the unwavering support of Maruca, Robert, and Penelope, that dream slowly became something far greater than a family restoration project. Together, we restored not only a château, but a way of living.Today, all five of us call Puy Vidal home.
Several times each year, we open its gates and invite others into the world that shaped us. Not simply a beautiful château. But a place where imagination is taken seriously. Where beauty is an act of love.
Where strangers become lifelong friends. Where adults are given permission to play, to wonder, and to remember the parts of themselves they thought they had outgrown. If you’ve ever felt there should be a place for people like you…People who still believe stories matter… We hope you’ll feel at home here.
With warmth and wonder,
On behalf of the Puy Vidal family,
