A Year at the Chateau

by Dick Strawbridge

  Then there was the second issue that in August everything shut down. The big DIY shops stayed open, but for the taps, beds and general décor I needed more individual shops. This came as a surprise and an annoyance. Even the local bakers and restaurants closed for most of August. Dick and I discussed that we were the ones that had it wrong (a month-long holiday is a lovely thing, after all), but that did not help the situation. For some of the necessities – such as the bathroom fittings and a bed for the honeymoon suite – I ended up looking on UK sites.

  The messy work was still overwhelming but with Dick home and the focus on items that were not utility-based, I felt calmer and was finally able to allow myself some real creative thoughts. I work best when my mind isn’t too clouded with problems and mess. This was when I had my idea for the turret in the honeymoon suite. The Bagliones had always used the turrets as functional spaces: either as washrooms or very basic facilities rooms, and most had storage space for clothes. Originally Dick and I talked about putting a bath in there but it seemed a bit gimmicky.

  I had to think about how this room could be used for our wedding business and I thought it could be a useful room for the bride to hang her dress in, out of sight of the groom. I imagined it as a space she could then sneak into if she wished. For this it needed to look special.

  I had also been wondering how I could showcase the wallpapers I had found in the attic. I had seen examples of patchwork walls with leftover wallpaper before. There was something in this but often the walls began to look too much: the shapes and sizes were wrong or they were all different. None of the images I found were quite the look I wanted. I sat on this idea for a couple of weeks and then realised that if I made the shapes identical, the designs would shine. I’ve always loved the Harlequin print and that was how the idea for the ‘wallpaper museum’ was born.

  First, Dick helped me measure the circumference of the turret. Then he made me a stencil guide to start cutting the diamonds of wallpaper. My first job was to bring the wallpaper down to the honeymoon suite. I used gloves for this and carefully picked up the rolls of wallpaper like they were little babies. It was the first time I really saw what was what and how much I had of each design.

  It was fascinating unravelling decades of design history. Once they were all down, I started organising it into collections. Straight away I found around six rolls of the yellow and green paper from the entrance hall. The texture was thick and it felt robust. Then I found four rolls of a pretty floral design with a swallow on it. On investigating, I found out this particular one was designed by French wallpaper designer Paul Dumas. The Bagliones clearly loved his style as there were a number of designs by him. Originally the swallow paper had been on the walls of the snug, which later became the kids’ playroom. As a family we were split on whether to keep it or not. But it is never a good idea to design by committee, so in the end I decided it needed to go and that room is now covered with Arthur and Dorothy’s own paintings. It did however earn a place in my wallpaper museum.

  That afternoon was magical for me. I spent hours matching cuttings with the rooms and discovering new wallpapers I had never seen in any of the rooms: from deep purples and greens to oranges, blues and golds. I found geometric wallpapers with gold foils, the kind of designs that have inspired many modern-day interiors. It was a feast for my eyes as well as my soul. My favourite bunch were very thin and delicate but rich in colour. They looked like they had been screen-printed by hand and then hand-finished with a stencil, and they must have been done at the turn of the nineteenth century. I couldn’t get over the vibrancy of the colour. The Bagliones were people after our own hearts. They clearly did not like throwing anything away!

  The next stage of this was to cut diamonds out and paste them to the wall. Dick let me use his fancy electronic leveller to get the rows horizontal and off I went. I have often cut up old magazines and papers and some people have gasped in horror, but I see it as giving a new life to something. It’s more powerful than putting it in a box and leaving it out of sight. It’s something I am a strong believer in. I’m not afraid of using valuable things. Yes, they may get broken, but at least they live again.

  With so much still to do and so many design details to finish, I was missing my London-based crafty girlfriend Sarah. Sarah used to work with me at the Vintage Patisserie. She was my support and we loved working on projects together. I even managed to persuade Sarah to be one of Vintage hostesses. During the years the Vintage Patisserie ran, I wanted all my team to follow their personal dreams too, so when my event space was not being used, they could use it to host their own events. Sarah used to host taxidermy evenings in the space and actually stuffed our first canary, Gerald, for us. I always feel bad saying this, but Gerald never looked better; he still sits proudly in our entrance.

  In mid-August, an SOS call to Sarah was made and out she came with her then assistant Sam for a working holiday. They helped with a bit of everything: painting, wallpapering, invites, butterflies. But the five days flew by too fast.

  August was also the month that we had to claim our salon back from Mum and Dad to get it ready for guests arriving in November. I was worried about Mum, though – we knew she would struggle with the stairs up to the vacant suites. In a fortunate stroke of serendipity, we were invited to a barbecue at Jacques and Isabelle’s house around this time. With so much activity at the château, our only outings were to the shops to get essentials, so it was joyous to spend the afternoon in someone else’s world.

  We dined together for hours and lots of franglais was spoken as we all righted the world and drank cidre. Lunch consisted of fresh baguettes, cornichons and tomatoes picked from the garden. It was simple but wonderful. This was the life that we had heard rumours of.

  After lunch, we were given a guided tour of Isabelle’s crops and I could see how happy this made Dick … It was an inspiration for our future. They kindly leant us some extra chairs for our wedding and even offered to help find some essential items like gravel (I had been struggling to find anywhere open that sold it). But the absolute best thing that came out of that lunch was the offer for us to rent a part of their house. It was the original part of their house before they had an extension added on. We had actually stayed in it once ourselves so knew it well; it had a nice bathroom, that lovely fireplace that we all drank bubbly around when we signed for the property and another room out the back that obviously has lots of things that are special to the family. The only thing missing was a kitchen, so Dick offered to fit this as a gift … The arrangement seemed to work for everyone: Jacques and Isabelle would receive some rental income and Mum and Dad would be able to unpack some bits and avoid the stairs in the château. They knew that as soon as we could, we would have them back on the island where they belonged.

  To be able to launch our business and have paying guests we needed to have at least one suite we were happy to use, to say this is who we are and what we are offering. Our criteria has always been, and will always continue to be, it needs to be good enough that we would want to stay there (or eat it, or do it), so our first suite (the honeymoon suite) had to be exciting for us. We had a plan that involved what would have been the master bedroom, but having started putting the electrics and heating in place, there was a discussion that changed our direction somewhat …

  I knew we had to do something to make the honeymoon suite extra special. I couldn’t work out why this room didn’t feel ‘wow’. Then it dawned on me: even with the quirky wallpaper museum and the vestibule outside the bathroom, it just wasn’t grand or big enough to host a bride, bridesmaids, friends, family, hairdresser, make-up artist and photographer. Sometimes you could have over twenty people in the room at one go. The room needed to be bigger … All I had to do was convince Dick.

  OK, I’ll admit Angela’s idea to join the upstairs salon where the master and mistress would have ‘met’ to what was the master bedroom was a brilliant idea. My girl was thinking about what happens on the morning of a wedding and how
to make it as wonderful an experience as possible. To be fair, I hadn’t had much insight into this part of a wedding; as far as I could work out, the chaps all disappear and turn up wearing what they are told. The wedding seems to be all about the bride, so having a lovely place for the bridal party to get ready and enjoy the build-up to the ceremony seemed very sensible. Unfortunately, in order to make this wonderful space we had to connect two rooms currently separated by a two-foot-thick stone wall and, as if that wasn’t interesting enough, there were fireplaces and chimneys in the wall as well.

  I made all the ‘it’s too difficult’ noises but when it became obvious they weren’t going to work, I changed tack and said Angela could make the hole if she wanted it that badly. She did and she did. The location of the ‘arch’ sort of selected itself (there were no other choices) and so it was a matter of getting on with it. The first thing that was needed were lintels above where the entrance was to be. That was really just a matter of being sensible. The principles are quite simple: if you remove a stone from a two-foot-thick wall it doesn’t all fall down; the force acts downwards and outwards from any given point on the wall, so it spreads out and down diagonally. So if your wall was a bit dodgy and you removed a particularly important stone, the stones below wouldn’t move, it would only be the stones above that could suffer. The ones at the side would also stay in and support, so in the worst case a triangle of stones could topple out. All I had to do was ensure the least number of stones possible were disturbed and immediately put in a lintel and rebuild above it as quickly as possible.

  With a set of lintels from one side of the wall to the other and the spaces filled in above them, I felt it was safe to let Angela loose with a jackhammer. We had some old mattresses on the floor so we could allow rocks to fall and out of the window was a chute that we could use to empty our debris. Work started two metres up and we worked down to the floor level. If you do some sums, assuming the density of the rocks is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000kg per cubic metre, we had to move over two tons of rock! When the effort taken to move them was combined with holding up a heavy old jackhammer for more than three hours, it’s no wonder Angela slept well that evening. And with all the jiggling from the hammering she was also very pleased that I had advised her to wear a sports bra … Just saying!

  With the rooms now joined together the ‘honeymoon suite’ was born. It was a long way from being finished but we knew where it was going and what was required and it was already obvious it was going to be very special.

  We have always wanted to keep as much of the history of the rooms in the château as possible, but the condition of the wallpaper and paint has tended to mean that we had to strip everything back before we could start making it lovely. When we removed the wooden panels from under the double-glazed window in the honeymoon suite, they were so badly rotted that there was nothing we could do but burn them. Initially, we thought this meant we needed to get some replacement panels – until we stopped and looked at the back of the cut stones that had been underneath the panels. They had been handmade over 150 years ago and you had to marvel at how interesting they were – bear in mind this is the back of the stones, not the face exposed to the world. Why not leave them on display? we thought. But that then opened a whole minefield of problems: there would be draughts, dust, moisture and all sorts of things getting in. Then we had a cunning idea for a see-through ‘window’ below the window. It worked and is lovely, so now it’s possible to see the stonework from inside the room.

  Armed with this wonderful solution, we tackled our old wooden panelling with renewed gusto. The panelling under the window in the tower felt very ‘spongy’, which even the uninitiated know is a bad sign, so we decided to pull it off and see if anything could be saved. I’m going to let Angela tell the story from here …

  There’s no denying that after only six months of living in the country I was not the bravest when it came to wild animals and spiders, but in my defence I come from Essex and it’s pretty tame there. And on this particular hot day in August I was not prepared for what happened. As we removed one of the spongy parts of the panelling from the tower of the honeymoon suite, the room filled with a cloud of black flapping bats. Dick says I screamed, and though I’d like to pretend I didn’t, it’s probably true. I also nearly wet myself. All I could think was what if they got caught in my hair? I was so flustered that I couldn’t really work out how to get away from them. They were everywhere. Whole families of them. It felt like I was in a Harry Potter movie! Though I love him, Dick’s laughing did not help at all. I could happily have throttled him. We managed to film a bit of the magic on our phones and then, almost as quickly as they emerged, they all seemed to disappear out of the open windows. Looking back, it was incredibly exciting.

  After the drama of that afternoon, the honeymoon suite very quickly came together. There was even a loo in the salon that we managed to connect to water and the proposed sewage route.

  There are some jobs that give you real satisfaction and putting a toilet into the little cabine de toilette* was one such task. We managed to save the beautiful linoleum and fit a tiny sink in the room. The honeymoon suite is directly above the entrance hall so the options for the sewage to leave it unseen were not many. With a bit of sleight of hand, I took the waste through the main wall and into the back hallway where the staircase is. I then disguised it by boxing it in and taking it through another main wall and across the service kitchen at ceiling height, and then finally, to finish off the subterfuge, I put in a false ceiling in the service kitchen. No one has ever commented on it – I doubt if many actually care where the poopage goes – but it works and, personally, I find it satisfying that I worked out a route to take the waste from the middle of the château’s most salubrious rooms at a 25mm-per-metre gradient to the western wall, down a couple of floors and then out the eastern wall to settle and be pumped under the moat to the filter beds. I’m sure there must be others who are similarly pleased by such things …

  With the electrics wired in and the sockets in place it was time for decorating and making things beautiful in all but the bathroom. However, before we could skim the walls and make good the new archway, we had one last job. We had to take up the solid-oak floorboards in the salon to rewire the chandelier in the main entrance hall below. For some unknown reason, the cabling went forward to the front of the château and then down through the wall past the front door to the basement before making its way, surface-mounted, to the rear of the château. To follow that route would had meant destroying the walls in the main entrance hall to put in new cables, and that was unacceptable. Anyway, we now had power distribution in the basement, the ground floor and the second floor, so it was a matter of finding a route to the nearest board, which ended up meaning we had to follow the loo waste pipe.

  Sustainability comes in many forms and buying quality that lasts is one philosophy that we subscribe to. But the cost of quality bathroom fittings can make your eyes water. And we had the added problem of sourcing what we wanted. When you go to a large DIY shop you will see displays of every sort of kitchen, bathroom, bedroom or living-room item you could ever want; however, a large proportion of what you see is not actually available to buy there and then – you have to order them and it can take weeks for them to arrive. Such a process was alien to us, and our tastes are such that our choices were already limited, so when we found bathroom fittings of quality that could be delivered to us at the château reasonably quickly, we had little choice but to pay. They were not the most expensive by a long way, but neither did they fit into the budget category.

  Having spent eight months in the château, I now had a much clearer vision for the rooms. Sometimes my thoughts had not fully developed until I had the blank canvas of the ‘prepared’ room to look at. Now Dick said this room was mine to play with. The bathroom in the honeymoon suite was so important.

  I’d won the first major argument and the sink was going to be on the ‘wrong’ wall – or should I say a wa
ll that meant it wasn’t as easy to get the water waste down. I did pay attention to these practical considerations but I also wanted what I thought to be best aesthetically and what felt right for use. The shower cubicle had to be spacious enough for two. The double sink, the toilet, the mirrors, the bath and the taps all had to be perfect. It took many frustrating hours sitting in bed searching on the internet before I found the perfect answer. It was a company called Arcade. They were inspired by the belle époque and their forty-seven-inch double basin literally made me shiver with excitement when I found it. Its graceful lines and refined elegance made me very happy and they delivered to France. Unfortunately, the price was such that I felt I’d better not tell Dick …

  I knew how much Angela had been struggling to find the right fittings and fixtures for the château. I did not interfere when it came to décor, but gas hobs or thermostatically-controlled showers and sink fittings – anything even a little technical – we discussed. Neither of us are good at compromising so we were each given the power of veto. This meant that only goods acceptable to both of us were bought. The results were excellent and we have been really pleased with our buys … Although I now know to avoid asking the price, as it is obscene how much you can pay to kit out a bathroom and I think my mental price list is set somewhere in the twentieth century.

  In the midst of all this work we also had a wedding to prepare for and I was more than a bit excited to be going home to see my family and friends for my hen party. This was my first trip back to London. I could not wait to give my grandma a big hug as I had not seen her since my grandad passed away. But I was also slightly anxious. I had never been away from Dorothy, ever … Mum had booked an overnight ferry from Caen to Portsmouth on the Thursday and then back again on the Sunday night. Caen is a couple of hours from our house and I wanted to take the slow route so we could enjoy the drive, so we set off in the afternoon. The roads are windy and beautiful, through lots of floral villages. Mum and I had lots to catch up on so it was lovely to get this time together.