Charles de Wailly was a French architect and urbanist, and furniture designer, one of the principals in the Neoclassical revival of the Antique. His major work was the Théâtre de l'Odéon for the Comédie-Française (1779–82). In his designs, de Wailly showed a predilection for the perfect figure, the circle.

De Wailly was born in Paris. Starting in 1749, he was the pupil of Jacques-François Blondel at l'École des Arts, where he met William Chambers and had as a schoolmate Marie-Joseph Peyre; later he studied with Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni and with Jean-Laurent Le Geay. After having obtained the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1752 he went to the French Academy in Rome for three years until 1755, sharing his prize with his friend Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux. Both participated in the excavations at the Baths of Diocletian. In Rome, de Wailly founded a friendship with the sculptor Augustin Pajou, who was to carve his bust and that of his wife and for whom, in 1776, he would build a house adjoining his own, in Paris.

On his return to Paris de Wailly showed his mastery of the earliest version of neoclassicism, being called the "Goût grec", by exhibiting a table with a lapis lazuli top and gilt-bronze mounts and a granite vase in the "goût antique" at the Salon of 1761; they were designed to be manifestos of a new taste, as the squib inserted in the Mercure de France states, in a "very noble style, far removed from the frippery manner ("air de colifichet") which has reigned so long in our furnishings."

About 1764, for the sumptuous Hôtel d'Argenson de Voyer, which he remodelled for Marc-René d'Argenson, marquis de Voyez in an advanced neoclassical style, he designed the gilt-bronze mounted marble and porphyry vase on pedestal that is now in the Wallace Collection, London; from de Wailly's drawings the sculptor Augustin Pajou made the wax models for the mounts.

In 1767, de Wailly was accepted as a member of the first class of the Académie royale d'architecture and, in 1771, was accepted in the Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the only professional architect of the time to win admission, a mark of his great facility as a draughtsman. Henceforth de Wailly regularly exhibited at the Paris Salons his renderings, designs and models. He gained wider publicity when two of his designs were engraved for the Encyclopédie and two more for the monumental Description de la france of the 1780s.

His reputation abroad grew through engravings of his works; he became particularly popular in Russia, where his disciples, some of whom went to Paris to study with him directly, included Vasily Bazhenov, Ivan Starov, and Andrey Voronikhin. Catherine the Great offered him a high post in the Imperial Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, which he refused.

In 1772, he was named site architect of the Château de Fontainebleau, jointly with Marie-Joseph Peyre. The following year, he was authorized to leave for a long stay in Genoa, to redecorate the seventeenth-century palace of Cristoforo Spinola in the Strada Nuova, working in tandem with Andrea Tagliafichi: the building was badly damaged in 1942. He was to return on several occasions to work in Italy.

Noticed by the Marquis de Marigny, brother of Mme de Pompadour and general director of the Bâtiments du Roi, de Wailly worked in the park of Marigny's Château de Menars and, thanks to his support, managed to obtain the commission of a new theatre for the Comédie-Française. In 1779, de Wailly and Peyre built their most famous work, the theatre of Odéon in Paris (see below). De Wailly also designed a project for the Opéra-Comique.

In 1795, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts – 3rd section (architecture), fauteuil V. With his death, Jean Chalgrin succeeded to his seat. He became conservator of the museum of painting in 1795 and was sent to the Netherlands and Belgium to select works of art after the annexation of these countries.

He married Adélaïde Flore Belleville who, after his death, remarried in 1800 to the chemist Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy. He was the brother of lexicographer Noël François de Wailly.

De Wailly died in Paris in 1798.