Septfontaines Castle

For two hundred years this valley was where the city did its washing. Seven springs rose here at the foot of the Bambësch woods — the Siwebueren, the seven fountains — and from 1736 the city kept eight roofed washing troughs beside them; the washerwomen paid two sous to wash, three to wash, bleach and dry on the meadows around. Then, on the 1st of April 1767, three brothers named Boch bought the old house and the land from the city to build a porcelain factory. Clay, water and wood for the kilns were all here, which was what they needed; the city's condition was that the women could go on using the troughs and the meadows. The Empress Maria Theresa, whose Austrian Netherlands this then was, gave the brothers permission and ten years free of tax, and her portrait still hangs in the dining room.

The factory prospered, and in 1783 and 1784 Jean-François and Pierre-Joseph Boch built themselves this house beside it, planned so that both families could live in it: two separate wings of bedrooms upstairs, the dining room and drawing room shared below. In 1836 the Boch firm merged with its rival Villeroy, and the name it has carried since — Villeroy & Boch — was born of a factory in this valley. French troops occupied the house in the Revolution; it was sold in 1914; and in 1970 Luitwin von Boch bought it back for the company, and his cousin spent twelve years restoring it. The rooms are full of porcelain now, and the firm used the house for its guests and its board when they came to Luxembourg.

The factory itself closed in 2010, after 243 years, and its ground is being turned into housing; the washing troughs went in 1968 to widen the road, and a plaque on the water tower remembers the seven springs. The castle was listed as a national monument in 2011, and in 2020 it was let to a business school. The Boch name is still on plates in half the kitchens of Europe.