FHS at Home: Innovation in Action - Château de Lalande

okay hello everyone my name is blake funston i am a co-chair of the french heritage society young patron circle i'm so pleased to introduce this first installment of this innovation action virtual event series over the next few months we'll hear from six dynamic chateau owners in france who've captured the covet moment by creating multimedia content through youtube instagram and crowdfunding platforms to raise awareness and support for their restoration work their stories have provided inspiration and much needed escapism to thousands of viewers worldwide today we'll hear from stephanie jarvis chatelaine extraordinaire of the chateau de la land joining us from the heart of france in the santro vale de la region stephanie's youtube channel the chateau diaries is helping to safeguard her historic property for future generations and now i'll hand it over to stephanie and our distinguished executive director of french heritage society jennifer harlan thank you blake thank you on behalf of all of us of french heritage society which includes 10 chapters across the united states and one in paris i say special bonjour to our members who have joined us today and a warm bienvenue to those of you who are new to our programming for those who may not be familiar french heritage society's mission over the past 38 years is awarding preservation grants to culturally and historically significant french architecture both in france and in the united states to date we have supported over 600 projects and that includes raising close to 2.6 million dollars following the tragic fire at notre dame which was two years ago tomorrow an equally important part of our mission is ensuring that the skills required to work on preservation projects are transferred to the next generation through our advanced student internship program each year we select and send around 35 university students across the atlantic for internships at esteemed institutions our members make our work both possible and fun and we are so grateful for their support lastly i would like to thank the fhs team for their work on this program natalie may very thoughtfully curated the series and ben wells is making sure that we have a top-notch experience together please note that you are welcome to submit questions through the q a button along the bottom of your screen throughout the program and i'll share them with stephanie following the conversation i thank stephanie so much for being here with us today and to set the tone for our conversation we thought everyone might enjoy being transported to the chateau de la land through this phenomenal video hi i'm stephanie and this is my home the 16th century chateau de la land la land was owned for hundreds of years by a family of marquis who were at the heart of french royal life one of them even had the honor of being sent by king murray the 15th to greet marie antoinette on her arrival in france but far from being a stuffy museum this chateau is a living home i live here all the time and i'm regularly joined by my mother my family my friends and wonderful volunteers from all over the world who helped me to lovingly restore this historic home welcome to la land a chateau filled with life love and laughter [Music] i was laughing because at the point when i said my mother there was a lag on my line that showed aloysius the sheep i'll let you and your mother sort that out so tell us let's start from the beginning how did you find chateau lalonde and settle in central france well it had been my dream since i was just a little girl i think like many many little girls you dream of being a princess and living in a castle and i lived in a very ordinary house a tiny bungalow but from there i went to live in a huge mansion because my parents were both nurses psychiatric nurses and they decided to start their own care home people with alzheimer's but my father had a very strong belief that even when people are mentally ill they still respond very well to their environment you know beauty can still help and so he felt that being in a beautiful building would help people to cope with the situation so he and my mother bought a place i hadn't been lived in for a long time he'd been used as a school had been institutionalized a while before and when i was just six years old i started to see them bringing that back to life and and that made me realize that i loved old buildings i loved seeing them being restored but also i love living them in them with a lot of people uh and that's what i wanted to look for then as an adult a beautiful place that i could restore and live in with a lot of people so of course chateaus fall perfectly into that category yeah well certainly yeah but it took a took a while i i just thought it would be in the distant distant future that i kept telling my best friend from university that one day we would buy together and i kept on at him i think i wore him down from the very first meeting we ever had so eventually we were each living in a two-bedroom flat in london and he was around for dinner one evening and i said do you realize if we sold our flats which we were thinking of doing because we thought it would be nicer to live in a little terrorist house together in london and i said if we sold them we would we could actually buy a chateau for the same price as the tiny places we're looking at in london and to my great amazement one day he said let's go for it i'll ask work tomorrow and if they say i can work remotely then we can make the move and so immediately the minute i had that i was going out to france regularly to view chateaus and how many did you see before you settled ultimately on la land i think it must have been at least 10 i don't remember the the number exactly but each time i had to fly to a different part of france because i didn't have any set criteria in terms of where i would live i knew it was more about the building and about having a connection with the building that you sometimes feel when you walk into the right place you just know it and in our price range we didn't have that much choice so i i really had to look absolutely everywhere and be quite open-minded we put an offer in on another place first that would have been far more manageable i think seven bedrooms and three acres and then at the last minute found out there was going to be a motorway 400 meters from it yeah so pulled out just in time and i was a little disheartened obviously you can imagine when you've decided on a place but it was all for the best because one day i drove down the drive with my parents and saw la land and before we even set foot inside i said to my father this is it this is the one it could occur as they say yeah and so tell us a little bit about la land what's the history what's the story of this particular chateau because they all have stories right they're all moments in over time absolutely every chateau in france has a story uh it's amazing well this chateau is it's a very old chateau it dates from the 16th century but that's the part that we have now we know that in fact there would have been at least a sort of manor house it could well have been a chateau in the 12th century here because we have the tax documents it's amazing what survives through time isn't it we have the tax documents of the lord who lived here in the 12th century and what was extraordinary is when we found those he listed all of the farms around um they were all his tenant farmers surfs in those days and it was all the same names the same surname as the people living there today and in fact when we moved in they said you know the family of marquis that you bought from they've been here 200 years they're newcomers around here we're with we've been here all the time when i found that document they were absolutely right the rest of us come and go after that it was owned by a lot of rather strong women interestingly um one of which was the cousin of louis xiv like handmade moiselle she was actually the richest heiress in france so i'm sure did not at any point live in this chateau she would have had many many estates and she got it because somebody hadn't paid the right duties um and therefore she got this chateau and the woman that she got it from spent something like 20 years uh in battle to get it back and did get it back and eventually it went to the dunada yak family who are the ones that really were very involved in court life uh they're a very ancient family they have another chateau that they've had for 600 years but for the last 200 since the french revolution since the restoration of the monarchy they've been living here they had to flee the country at the revolution because they were then the head the monkey was the head of the king's guard and he went with his son to england they fought against the french against napoleon and with the restoration of the monarchy his son came back to france married the heiress of this chateau um which had been saved during the revolution because presumably her father had said to the revolutionaries please please come in help yourself to anything you like here's food and drink let's chat about this what a great cause uh please just don't burn the chateau take whatever you want and he saved la la it's a beautiful story but you've also saved it because when you bought the chateau it wasn't quite in the shape it is now what was the status of the work that was happening at the time and what have you had to look into yourself well i have to hand it to the previous owners because they loved this chateau very very much and they had done everything they could to keep the fabric strong so extremely lucky we have an excellent roof structurally it's very sour we find problems every now and then that's natural in an old house but inside it needed all of the plumbing all of the electrics uh septic tanks no one ever truly got to the bottom of where that was before um and in fact in trying to do uh the best that they could against the dam in the 1970s they had put asbestos cladding on every single exterior wall of the ground floor so you can imagine the job that it was to have a special convoy taking that away to be properly destroyed so there were there were a lot of things to do and for about five years we were just in constant works here so how much of that were there were there a lot of surprises that were a part of that in the first five years or were there things that you you suspected most of which we suspected we could see that the structure was was in a good state so we didn't have a very full survey because we thought to ourselves there will be so much unexpected that we have to spend money on that we may as well not spend the money on the survey we know the roof is good and we really in the shadow if you know the roof is good and we knew about the asbestos so with those two things the rest you can just get to bit by bit but we have over 100 windows for example almost all of which need replacing 16 years later i think we've replaced about five but you know it would be a long process right and how was the restoration work funded before your your multimedia presence of all well i was extremely optimistic and thought that it would be a lot cheaper than it was a lot faster but i'm happy that i was optimistic because i think if i'd known the truth i would have been too scared to buy so sometimes right speaking before you look and have good results i don't necessarily recommend it to others but when we brought my parents sold uh their house and moved into a tiny one-bedroom house and so they forgot that they had a daughter finally persuaded them to put a mezzanine bedroom and they decided to do a lifetime inheritance for me which is when you give somebody their inheritance whilst you're still alive and uh so they were incredibly kind they did that and i spent half of that on a small flat in london which i rented out and with that helped just keep the maintenance costs in fact that is the only thing that kept me going all of these years and the other half was spent on doing the works that i mentioned all of the plumbing all the electrics all of the heating they were the big things uh antiseptic tanks and then of course i ran out so i wasn't too sure exactly what to do next nick my co-owner who's my best friend from university he was just amazing i mean he's he's basically been bailing this place out whenever he could all of these years and then of course i started the bed and breakfast which is what a lot of chateau owners do because that's that's the accepted way of trying to bring in funds to these places but we're very isolated here it's not the touristy region and it was a very slow start but that improved when i was on television in england and after that the bed and breakfast did very very very well and in fact the first year that we were going to break even on the chateau for for the running cough for the bed and breakfast was last year and then covert struck a moment and when did you start documenting your progress on video and and how did that evolve into your successful social media presence that you have now well i mentioned there just briefly that we were on television in england uh that was yeah five years ago that that we first appeared yeah we have a lot of volunteers coming here we used to be on a site called work away and i once got a website from somebody saying hi i'm not actually a volunteer i work for a production company in england and we're looking for british chateau owners in france uh to start in a show about restoring what chateau is so i was curious and i i got back to them thinking it would be a tiny little show on an obscure channel and it turned into the biggest daytime tv launch in several years in england so that was incredible being on that show made a huge difference because i had i'd gone through a period of being really quite alone here because uh nick had to go back to england for work he wasn't able to stay that's my friend and my father sadly died in 2009 and my mother uh very happily a few years later met percy who is is now my stepfather seems so weird calling him that anyway he's the most wonderful man he's absolutely lovely but he lives in south africa so my mother was then half of the year in south africa i'd lost my father whom i was incredibly close to and he was a very strong presence here because he was like me in times of optimism and like me he saw everything finished in his mind's eye so he never minded about the interim process and nick and my mother were both more realists so i was the only optimist saying oh this is a great idea and so i was quite literally alone at times at the chateau uh which which is a little daunting when you work to it but but suddenly i was on television and people i've never met were contacting asking about chateau live asking everything about the history of the place and showing the same enthusiasm that i felt for it and the same love and passion for it and not only that but i was the other owners from other chateaus on the same show and that was eye-opening because we had all the same problems down to oh do you get a room that just has flies that appear from the wall in their thousands one week and then disappear like yes we all get what is that uh so things that made you realize that you weren't alone in what you were going through i would imagine that's very comforting when you're undertaking something of that scale and after being alone for so long it really was incredibly comforting so i decided that i i didn't know there would ever be a second season of the show but i wanted to keep that magic that connection with this community of chateau lovers and so i decided to really uh be on my instagram more and more but i felt like the instagram went really well but i felt that it didn't really reflect shadow life because an image is curated to be absolutely perfect because honestly if there's mess or something in an image that's all the person will see so it really won't have to be uh just right but chateau life isn't like that i mean behind me it all looks fairly tidy but if i swizzle the camera around i'd be over there there's always work going on there's always buildings right there's a wall that's just been taken down in this room and the floor levels are different for example the instagram wasn't capturing the truth and so i started instead making igtv videos and that i found my medium somehow i i really loved it i was quite addicted to making these little glimpses into daily life here and they did really well um bit by bit my audience was growing and by the end of 2019 i had 10 000 uh subscribers i'd moved on to youtube by that point but that was nothing compared to what was about to happen in the in the first lockdown it's very impressive and i think you know you mentioned that you see the find you know the finished product which i think is a real skill and it's an important one when you're undertaking the type of work that you are i know we have some uh pictures some a slideshow that shows some of the before and after restoration work i wonder if that would be a good time to show that sure you see the chateau so yeah uh so yes there's the little chapel and later i will show you um a couple of shots of the interior but basically it looks very uh you know white uh pristine on the outside but inside it's a 19th century jewel box the chapel was built in 1866 it was consecrated by the archbishop of bourge and that's going to be our next big renovation project at le lanz the restorer should be arriving next month fingers crossed if we look at the next slide this is the old wing the original wing uh and as i say i think that the chateau was older even than this wing but this is what we have that remains and this was probably late 15th or early 16th century an architect thought around 1490 probably and there you can see the defenses it's uh it's still got the maturations and inside those maturations you have the defensive walls still and then an inner defensive wall where attackers could be there firing out but the gun powder that was stored in the middle of that space behind them would be safe from any incoming trajectories so it's it's wonderful to be in a house so old that we remember these vestiges of what would have been just after the 100 years war between britain and france and then on the next here we see the 19th century part that was built on it was originally um all 16th century but there was a fire in the 19th century and so they had to do big repairs so in the central part with the large tower uh the outside walls are still many of them original and the internal walls for example i'm sitting in in that area now and the internal walls are nearly a meter thick so they're not 19th century walls but it was remodeled then and then in the next now this this was a very sad story we lost the lake at la land because of an eu directive and and the water police asked me to drain the lake a few years ago now seems that we shouldn't have trained the lake because uh so old it's on maps several hundred years ago and therefore we should be allowed to keep it so this is also a huge renovation that is about to start and that's getting the lake back which i'm very excited about because uh it's very strange to just have a large wetland the wetland in itself is nice but we lose that historical part of the chateau which is such a shame right uh then the next slide well there we go that's it now okay yeah so where we've got a little boathouse so you can't go onto a boat at all uh yes so the next one is the interior of the chapel that's a fresco above the door and i believe that this fresco is the death of saint joseph because our chapel is the is the chapel of saint joseph and these are the walls so every wall in the chapel is like this but the whole thing is absolutely covered in these frescoes and so going to be a very very large renovation project but i think that in the lake they're the two most important ones to do here which there's no way that i could have tackled those at the beginning but now finally we're able to to get to things like this which is wonderful i think next the next ones are just showing you what we have been done doing so far this was the salon this is the castle uh when we were putting in underfloor heating and taking down a lot of internal walls that had been added in the um 19th century probably to be able to heat the rooms by making them much smaller so we put back the afilad as it would have been in the past and the next photo is the khan salon now um so better but it's actually still got a long way to go and at the end of the slideshow i will tell you a little secret about that because something exciting is going to be happening there soon and the next photo i can't quite remember which one it was so this is the afilad i said that we wanted to put back the amphilad i'm sure most of you know within french shadows each reception room led to the next though there were no corridors in the 19th century they'd added corridors which stopped the light from flowing straight through in the room i'm sitting in now for example there's a window down the window right in front of me because the chateau looks huge but it's only one room deep so by removing the corridors we got lights from both sides and all of the reception rooms downstairs and the next picture shows the enfield now so little yeah when they were in those states before my mother was in such a state she just couldn't uh but my father and i were loving every minute and what photo oh yes close up of a mushroom uh this is the dry rot dry rot that we had in what was then the billiard room meaning that we had to rip out all of the paneling all of the flooring this is why downstairs we have um terracotta flooring which has all been reclaimed both from our own attics and from all over france and it's all antique uh terrapot of flooring but this is why because we we just had to start from scratch otherwise we would have lost all of the wood in the chateau could let it carry on and the next photo is that billiard room which we now use as as a winter salon so you can see here that we did what we could with the decoration the walls are just painted it's it's no paneling has gone back yet but with the funds that we had we made it as livable and nice and healthy for the building as possible and this is the dining room and the dining room now looks like uh the next photo yeah it was three little rooms before the dining i'm sorry about the mess in the dining room in that photo i was actually doing some of the sewing because i did all of the curtains uh in the chateau that took a couple of years of constant sewing it's gorgeous and i'm not sure thank you thank you yeah so the dining room is really i think it's a lovely one it's very small it's a little jewel box and the next photo is the kitchen yes here we've got a couple of before shots of the kitchen um you might even have three before shots of the kitchen because i know that uh some of my patrons are here with us this evening watching and they see the kitchen all the time because i'm always filming in there it's the heart of the home that's what's living in there there's my front of the window and my mother just coming in from the fda cuisine in the back of my head i think and the next one is the kitchen now yeah a little better so nice and light but even there um the the piece of furniture that has the sink in it just next to the window we found that in an out building and we just fitted an old sink into it the kitchen table was already here the chairs were my parents chairs from their british home the light is from ikea and the top of the dresser we found in the attic and just added some shelves so everything we did with what we could and as you'll see there's still no coving for example that still got to go in but we're lucky because that whole area had its original flagstone floors so but the bones of the building are very good yeah and uh this was the bedrooms this is a rare sighting of my co-owner the elusive nick because he's not you've seen in my videos this is when we were first visiting the place actually um and just wandering around if i think it was the day we signed the day we signed to buy it which was the first day that nick had ever seen it because at work he couldn't come and view it and i'd shown him no clothes i told him this is the place i'm sure of it and he was so lovely that he flew to france and signed on a chateau that he had never seen until then he's he's probably just still a bit overwhelmed at that point and then the next photo shows me in that room making all of the curtains so we had huge curtain drops up upstairs and i found a tiny bit of matching fabric to the wallpaper only enough to make the swags and the tails and that's what i'm fixing there and then i got some yellow fabric to finish the room which you'll see in the in the next shot so with everything we were using what we had and then just adding whatever whatever was missing to try to save as much money as possible and i think the next photo yes this is the champion now chambered does not sound like a very elegant name for french chateau but that's was the valet of the mother of the marquis who sold the chateau to me no sorry his grandmother his grandmother's valet and this is the room closest to her bedroom and so this is where jorge lived for years and years and years the marquee remembered him he must have been a very good valet indeed because apparently on her death his grandmother actually left him a little flat in the in in he must have been very good at his job so this uh in the next photo you'll see what we did to his bedroom uh so very feminine now a little princess room because it's a tiny room so i chose a very small it's an eighteenth-century french lia la colonese and i made all of the curtains for it and yes that's that's the champa de poise now the next room is the chamber de la tour which is the very first room i ever slept in when i came to the chateau de la because before i bought another family had made an offer at exactly the same time well just later the same day and the the marquee was very kind because he hadn't signed for our offer yet uh so he didn't need to sell to us but he wanted to sell to a french family it was so honorable that because we'd signed first he said i would like to change your mind because you're not married to nick your friends um and i would have loved a family to live here and i think that you're dreaming you're only 29 you're you're not sure of the reality of it so please come and stay so my mother and i went to stay i stayed in that bed and i loved it just as much the next morning and uh begged him to still sell it to me and thank goodness he did because i've been so happy here and he came back many times very sadly he died last year he was the most wonderful man he celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary here with his wife so we we just kept seeing each other staying in contact and he said in the end he was very happy that he'd sold to us it had worked out but that beautiful connection is just but that's also what makes up the history of these chateaus and of these properties right that owner was it was part of him and he was so attached to it excuse me and that's why i kept all of the names that they used that's why bathroom will be roger's bedroom for as long as i am here i'm keeping that sense of history and and so this is how we decorated the champa de la tour because it was a little drab a bit sad but it had this beautiful original wallpaper and so by adding this actually tomplo paneling in this case uh done quite brilliant michael petrick of uh doing it ourselves he's so talented and he did all of that and i made the curtains the bed curtains and paint we painted the bed uh so it yeah it made a huge difference i think for sure and i'm not sure what the next the next picture is oh there's lyland from a field la land from africa and uh yes what is the next one now this is the yeah there's something i've just revealed to my patrons today so i can finally talk about this is that i have literally just arrived last week purchased this original 18th century paneling for the grand salon at the chateau which is such a dream come true i can't describe it because in patreon you have various uh targets and target amounts and you can set goals and so i had at the very beginning set a goal um that if we ever reached the 30 000 target we would source 18th century paneling and we hit the 28 000 target today and i realized that it's coming soon and it's not easy to find 18th century paneling i'd been looking for months and months and suddenly this was being sold from an hotel particular on the ilsan lui in paris and i just jumped at the opportunity and this will be installed later this year in the car salon i think this next picture is the same yes it's the same paneling so finally uh all of the paneling here had been lost in the fire in the 19th century so finally la landers is blossoming and becoming what it would have been in the past and going through another renaissance because of my patrons so a huge thank you to them uh congratulations there's a lot of enthusiastic responses that are coming in on the chat line about that woohoo it looks fantastic it looks amazing um and someone else commented on how brilliant your inventive witness is in using what was already there so i i think people are really enjoying er really enjoying that snapshot of the work that's been done um i'll also share this other comment because i do think that this is something that makes what you're doing very special as well and it said that the intro is what's helped thousands get through various lockdowns so i i think that the way that you're telling your story and the way that you're sharing your experiences is it it's just really even transcending the work that you're doing it's it's bringing all of us there i think it's a it's this community side of living here that we help people through renovation is nice to look at and it's very uplifting just before and after i think that lifts everyone but i the real reason that people have been watching is seeing a group of people living together especially in a lockdown when many people have been totally isolated in that and seeing us in the countryside which means that you don't feel the sense of lockdown in the same way and people have been able to find escapism with us which is really wonderful yeah i think so too and how do you because doing any one of these things is is an extraordinary amount of work but how do you balance being a full-time content creator with also overseeing this restoration project it's been very hard to find the balance um at first i didn't have so much to do on the renovation front because i didn't have the funds and so i could really it was constantly on the content creation but then when the qualification took off and i was i'm up to five half an hour videos per week um at the same time you can see the renovation picks up because there are the funds for it and i find myself two full-time jobs and the way that i've found to deal with that is by filming one of them for the other so i can talking about what needs doing and uh if i film it that then gives me content for for the other job and so the two go well together actually yeah i can see that you can wear both hats at the same time so to speak of course yeah and how do you think this funding model will affect others preservation efforts i know you've found a real community i found a huge community what happens is i i stumbled actually across this funding method it wasn't a plan um i had uh very very loyal subscribers so not that many but they watched every video and they were very engaged and uh yeah i'd get lovely comments and a few people just a few was like three or four had said have you heard of patreon because we would love to send a little something every month to help with the restoration of the chapel i think most specifically at the beginning and i haven't heard of it honestly uh so i looked it up i think we know it less in europe i think it's much more known in america and i thought well i'll do it thinking imagine if i could get another 100 or 200 a month that really would make a big difference in those days that was that was a big difference um so i started it in february 2019 and it but the response was beyond anything that i could have imagined by the end of the following month by the end of march 2018 i was receiving over two thousand dollars a month and as i say we've just hit twenty eight thousand dollars a month today that's just one year later uh and i i couldn't have foreseen that at all and then meanwhile the youtube ad revenue has gone up because we've now got nearly 130 000 subscribers so that grew a lot during lockdown and i find that now we've been able to make the patreon account a non-profit only for the renovation restoration uh rely new life of la land which means that i am legally obligated only to spend the money on the chateau on the renovation of the chateau and that means that my youtube ad revenue is used to pay the people who are involved with the bed and breakfast here or the managing of the chateau all of our food all of our montreal asks that comes from that pot so the two pots are very very separate yep operations and restoration really yes and you can't have one without the other no no the two go together so i have a company very strangely registered company called um content creation of bed and breakfast so i think that was registering as that in the local area uh but that is what's enabled us to to move forward and it made me think a lot about how stately homes were funded in the past i know much more about the british model here but we lost so many stately homes in england in the 1950s uh post two world wars because the land rents were simply not enough to support houses they always been supported by agricultural rents before and when that wasn't possible especially with the new taxes in those countries in england after the war um they just couldn't keep going and a lot were destroyed and those that weren't destroyed uh survived because they switched to a new funding method that was extremely shocking at the time they decided to share their homes with the public i mean it was really shocking we cannot imagine now how shocking that was and we have the mark quest of bath that long leaked to thank for that because he was the first to open his home and he was followed by the dukes of marlborough at blenheim and the dukes of chatsworth um at uh juice of devonshire at chatsworth sorry and that made a huge difference but really in the press there was a great deal of shock about this uh it was said peers have now become florists and caterers in order to maintain their homes people couldn't believe it and we walked in a magazine in the 1950s about lord salvary at hatfield house having to queue uh in an orderly line of tourists to manage to get a book from his own library but if they hadn't done that then we wouldn't have the model we have today of people saving these homes through bed and breakfast wedding events opening their gardens to the public giving tours of their homes and now i feel i've just taken it to the next logical stage which is i'm not just sharing my home i'm sharing our life within the home um with a greater audience and that's been miraculous it's it's absolutely saved i'm sure it can save other shadows as well and i think it also it increases understanding and awareness about what it what it takes to preserve these extraordinary properties it also makes them accessible not everybody has the capability of perhaps coming to stay or coming to visit but it allows them to be a part of that which i think is really important as well absolutely just as i will watch people on the other side of the world having a life that i could never have it's just amazing yeah it's wonderful and i think this past year has shown us all how important it is to find those connections and there are so many people on the chat line which we'll be sure to share with you who have just thanked you for that and thank you for making them feel a part of it and thank you for bringing them into your world which has been especially meaningful this past year being as life-changing for me far more so than than it has been for them people say that it's helped them lock down but it's transformed our lives here yeah i'm going to move over to some of the questions that have come in during our conversation and i think one uh i am particularly excited about as so rachel jones would like to know she's curious about what upcoming project for the chateau are you most excited about completing oh it's so impossible to answer because there's so many good ones um at the moment i'm on a real high about the paneling yeah we all are we were just awestruck as it was arriving but the lake and the chapel have always been the things that i've been most excited about and but then long-running projects are going to take a long time the lake specifically will be several years but some shorter time ones are the paneling and the room that i'm sitting in now just getting my office finished things like that oh great yeah and uh janna miranda asks the view of the old tower shows the smaller window in the bathroom off of shaumbra purse but i also see a ground level wall doorway below the winter salon am i seeing that correctly um on that side i haven't seen a doorway on that side well now i've got no one to have a look and see what something else because i we do not know all of the secrets of leland that's absolutely certain that window we have asked the architect uh recently she's putting in plans for us to reopen it to its original size so the whole facade is going to go back to the way that it was yeah and another wonders how do you uh sherry dugan asks how do you find the artisans to restore the chateau well that's actually uh quite difficult we're lucky in the local area there are excellent artisans the people working on the terrace at the moment are specialists in restoring ancient buildings uh they're very very busy so for example a great carpenter came recently and he is going to be doing panelling in one of the bedrooms he cannot start until october uh so i'm very lucky as well because we have two strong sort of building farms that we work with and that people will know from watching the vlogs and so they're here doing constant works they tend to do things like putting restoring the outbuildings the attics those places and then we get more specialist artisans to come and do the renovation works um another question is uh and this is an interesting uh differentiation are you restoring or are you renovating we're doing both yeah because the way i see it is restoration is um taking something back to the way that it would have been rather than preservation uh which is keeping it in the state and not allowing it to deteriorate so to take it back to what it was um but i don't want to just take leiland back to what it was but i do want plumbing uh and electrics and some some modern comfort this is a house that is very very lucky because it's retained its original function of being a home many many haven't been that lucky before because it gives us museums which is fantastic but it is very nice that we're in a house that has been added to by every single generation as i mentioned with the khan salon so that enables us to imagine doing a room with 18th century paneling which will have a 16th century ceiling and 19th century furniture for example and that's the way we'll continue to restore this house that's the philosophy here because that's the soul that eclecticism is the soul of la land yeah uh there's a very specific question from loretta dimick she says i love watching the chateau diaries and only discovered it recently where did you find the gorgeous venetian mirrors that she sees throughout the chateau i actually bought them in london i wish i could say i'd gone to venice and bought them there i bought them in london a long time ago i really love them too yeah i love venetian morris anything venetian really and then the question from bertrand proof in french who says it's a beautiful metamorphosis thanks to your beautiful combination of love for the property good taste and good humor they'll be in france in may do you accept last minute appointments less than a minute last minute visits absolutely um if people uh contact uh the chateau then nothing deals with any requests and i'm always happy to show people great and i let's see speaking of plumbing uh i'd love to hear more because now we're all thinking about my god yes who wouldn't want plumbing uh speaking of plumbing i'd love to hear about the process of sneaking bathrooms and other modern comforts into the fabric of the building that is quite a difficult thing it's something that each chateau owner tackles differently i i personally don't like it when i go to um a house that were often often the ones that were done sort of in the early 20th century where they would literally just put a little wall taking a corner of the room out and put a bathroom in that i'd rather lose the room next to it and have that as a bathroom if there's a luxury of doing that and where there isn't here we've tried to solve it by putting tiny shower room so we lose on on the size of the bathroom but into the thickness of the old walls we were lucky because the previous family put cupboards into that thickness um and so instead we sort of made them slightly bigger and put tiny shower room so we have managed to get a bathroom for almost every bedroom without losing the proportions but it's not an easy thing to do i i bet it's not um and here's a nice one i think almost for coming to to the end what are you doing to transcend negative thinking or getting into fear concerns about the future especially during these uncertain times um i'm very optimistic i wish i could say there was like something i think i think of but i i'm quite i'm quite a naturally optimistic person i think that even if there are hard times this too shall pass so we tend to say let's face music and dance that is a beautiful beautiful thing to leave us on i i i don't have any other questions i don't believe uh so i will thank you stephanie so much for sharing your passion your vision and it's an extraordinary project and i think that there are many who look forward to coming to france when we're able to travel again and especially to visiting properties like yours that have such love and have undergone such extraordinary work well i'm very excited to open our doors to everyone again and thank you it's been an absolute joy talking to you yeah and thank you very much what you do really uh your society is helping so many places uh it's really beautiful work yeah we're we're fortunate we work with many wonderful properties and as you've discovered you mentioned you know in france heritage and artisanry is is really valued and it makes it a pleasure to do the types of things that that we're doing yeah yeah it is a joy thank you all thank you goodbye everyone

Channel: French Heritage Society

Views: 48,529

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Id: ZqtAugdNG2w

Length: 48min 38sec (2918 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021