Former military base inspired by US cities is preserved French curiosity

"Consider it France’s first American-built suburbia,” says Bruno Mascle, author of 1951-1967 – Les Américains à Châteauroux (2017; La Bouinotte Éditions).

Just six kilometres north, Brassioux, a 350-home exurb in Déols (Indre), is where Mr Mascle, a retired journalist who worked 40 years for La Nouvelle République in Châteauroux, bought a house in 2009.

On one side, it mirrors the standard 1970s-80s French middle-class suburb, with its two-storey cottage homes; on the other, the scene shifts: single-storey houses with screen doors, wide front yards, low-pitched roofs, attached garages, standardized floor plans, and streets curving into culs-de-sac. 

This is no coincidence: Brassioux was inspired by Lakewood and Panorama City, the quintessential post-war planned suburbs of 1950s America.

Before Brassioux, there was a single farm on swampy land. Built in 1957 to house U.S. Air Force officers stationed at the nearby Base Aérienne 103 de Châteauroux-Déols, it emerged during the Marshall Plan era, when American investment was reshaping Europe.

Châteauroux in the 1950s lacked public healthcare, electricity, and running water. Brassioux, financed by NATO and the U.S. government, was its antithesis: a cookie-cutter suburb with uniform ranch-style homes, attached garages, curving streets, and prefab construction. “Americans came in here like kings of the hill,” Mascle says.

Houses featured subfloor heating and unlimited access to fuel oil and electricity. Interiors emphasized practicality, with built-in storage, modern kitchens, and two-to-three bathrooms.

At La Martinerie Air Base, troops enjoyed state-of-the-art amenities: a 600-bed hospital, two cinemas, football and baseball fields, a bowling alley, a nine-hole golf course, and a firefighters’ barracks. They shopped at the PX, a supermarket selling fridges, radios, and TVs – luxuries at the time.

“Similarly, consider that they brought the first supermarket to France,” he adds.

At its peak, over 14,000 GIs were stationed in Châteauroux and its surroundings, employing up to 400 French locals.

Brassioux’s blueprint: car-centric layouts, standardised homes, and self-contained amenities, prefigured France’s banlieue pavillonnaire explosion. By the early 1970s, more than 40 Levitt-style developments dotted the landscape of suburban Paris, urban historian Marie Cartier wrote in La France des “petits-moyens” (2008), marking a shift from grands ensembles to single-family homes.

The last Americans departed in December 1967, following De Gaulle’s 1966 decision to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated command. A farewell ceremony on March 23, 1967, marked their exit. French families took over, buying the homes and gradually adapting them. The original street names – Texas Drive, Ohio Drive, Nevada Avenue – became allée des Anémones, avenue des Capucines and allée des Primevères. The characteristically American open front yards were enclosed with privet hedges, delimiting the space.

“The Cité de Brassioux remains a strange enclave, an exiled archipelago in the Champagne berrichonne countryside, just five kilometres from the urban area,” writes PSS-archi, a collaborative platform dedicated to architecture, urban planning and territorial planning.

Yet Brassioux never fully shed its identity. 

“There is a little ‘supplément d’âme’,” Mascle insists – a touch of added soul. “It remains an American area.”

The US Museum in Châteauroux, run by the association Châteauroux c’était l’Amérique, preserves relics from the era: Cadillacs, jazz records, and the first hamburgers cooked on French soil. Nearby, the Saint-Cyran building, a 13-storey tower built for NATO generals, still looms over the city, while the Flamme de l’Amitié (Flame of Friendship), lit in 2010, honours the transatlantic bond. 

The Collège La Fayette, originally Collège Touvent, constructed by Americans between 1951 and 1967, was renamed in 2017 for the 50th anniversary of the base’s closure.

Since 2025, the annual Brassioux American Days festival has kept the spirit alive with cowboy hats, mechanical bulls, and 1950s nostalgia.

In March 2026, Mascle ran for the départementales elections on a platform of “revitalising local commerce”.

For Brassioux, this meant reviving the neighbourhood’s commercial heart: “There’s only a small grocery store and a pharmacy left. What we would have wanted was a tobacco shop and a newsagent. We would have needed a hairdresser and a baker.”

He lost, with 48.47% of the vote.

His connection to Brassioux transcends politics, however. As a child, he grew up in Chennevières, a small village in Eure-et-Loir along the D939, where the U.S. Air Force was stationed from 1953 to 1967. “My basket was full of American toys,” he remembers.

“I grew up with a baseball bat lying around wherever I went in the house.”

In 2009, he bought a house in Brassioux, donating part of the kitchen to the US Museum. “When I was gardening, I found Lincolns.”

The coins, relics of his childhood, resurfaced in the soil, literally binding him to the place.

“You do not move into Brassioux by accident,” he says. “You never get over your childhood. It’s a family inheritance.”