Private Tour: The Chateau of Interior Designer Timothy Corrigan | Restoration & Decoration Explaine

Welcome to the Chateau de la Chavalerie. This is my home in the French countryside, located around two hours outside of Paris, just on the border of Normandy and Loire Valley. It's an 18th century chateau, which I bought in 2018 and totally restored. I really wanted to maintain the integrity of the original structure, but update it for the needs of today. So I'll be showing you a little bit about the restoration and some photos of what it was like before, and then how it's really meant to be a place to really live in the 21st century. Let's go inside, and I'll give you a share. As you can see, this is a magnificent three-story staircase, and it has all these sort of original grandeur of the chateau. The staircase is all made out of iron, and the family crest is shown throughout the chateau on the staircase, and you'll see it other places in the chateau. And I'll give you a little explanation later about the family crest. I wanted the entrance hall to be warm and inviting, so I filled it with all these portraits. Some of them are my own family, my great-grandparents, my grandparents, even my father are here in the portraits, but then a mixture of other ones that I found, and it creates this sort of wonderful sense of intimacy, but also a sense of history, and I think that was so important. I also decided to make it sort of warm and inviting by having lots of flowers and the warm carpet that runs all up the stairs. This serves sort of as the central spine for the entire chateau. You pass through this everywhere you go, so I really wanted it to make a real wow statement. So from here, I'd like to take you into the Petit Salon, which is just next door. When I looked at buying this chateau, I looked at over 50 different chateaux all around France. I looked at much bigger, and even a few that are smaller, but what I saw when I saw this one that was so extraordinary was the quality of the details of how it was built. All the original boiserie or wood paneling, the beautiful Parquet de Versailles. The Parquet de Versailles is found on all three floors. Many of the, even of the great chateaus, only have them on the ground floor. So it was all those details that I really fell in love with. This room, as you can see here, has got beautiful paneling as well, and what I wanted to do was I wanted to accentuate the paneling and the details by painting it several different colors. When I founded this room, it was all, basically all white, so you didn't even notice the details. I also, as you'll see, is I really wanted this to be a whole chateau that was livable. I did not fill it with lots of spindly little gold furniture that would be what you might expect in a traditional chateau. I wanted it to be comfortable and livable for today. So you'll see there's lots of comfortable furniture, and this is all actually outdoor fabric. So, and the rug is made out of solution-dyed acrylic, so you can spill wine on it and not worry about it. You can really live in it. This is actually all my fabrics from perennials, and it's really meant to be lived in fearlessly. This is a room where we sit by the fire. There's a place to play games. The Wi-Fi comes in here, so we've got Wi-Fi throughout the whole chateau, so it's a great place where I often do Zoom meetings as well. We're going to go next into the yellow salon, and the yellow salon is really one of the rooms that I absolutely fell in love with because of the incredible carved paneling that you're going to see in this room. As you can see here, there are overdoors, carved overdoors on all the four main entrances to the room. These here show the arts and sciences, and on the other side, you see the Four Seasons. These are all carved out of wood. You look at them, you can't imagine. You think that there must be plaster or resin or something else, but they're all beautifully carved wood from the 18th century, and we actually took heat guns to remove all the centuries of paint on them to get back to the original details, and that's where you really start to appreciate. You look at the ceiling with all the beautiful details. When I painted this room, I wanted it to be bright and sunny. It's an incredibly bright room. It's got windows on two sides and these four big openings, but I wanted it to even feel, on the grayest day, like today, I wanted it to feel like it was sunshiny. So an interesting story, there's a very famous room in London called the Yellow Room by Nancy Lancaster, and so I went and I took a special paint reader from Benjamin Moore to match that color exactly, and I thought, oh, it's a perfect color, so I matched it, painted it here, and I came for the first time, and it was fluorescent bright yellow, and I realized, my goodness, I hadn't taken into consideration the location. So where in London, where the yellow was so perfect, it was a dark gray room in London with one window. Here in the Lower Valley, where it's so much more sunny, we've got all these windows, that yellow did not translate, so then I had to paint it another time. This time, I painted it a pale yellow, and it was just wimpy and really not very inviting. So finally, on the third time, I got it right, and I love this yellow, and it's accentuated with the crisp white, so you really start to notice all of the details. This room also is meant to be all about comfort. So again, you see there's the two different seating areas, and again, this is with outdoor performance fabric. Even the rug, which I designed, is an outdoor rug, so you can, again, you can pour wine on it, you can spill, you can truly live on it without having to worry, and I think that's such a key thing about living in a chateau, is to make it a place that you want to just come and relax. It should not be too formal, it should not be stuffy. It should not feel like a museum, but really a place that you want to hang out. So let's go into the room just behind me, which is the gallery, which runs along the back of the chateau on three different rooms, and as you can see, it's got all these wonderful windows. This is the way to go outside, and just to give you a sense, I would love to just give you a sort of a sneak peek. You're gonna see more of it later, but I wanted to give you just a sneak peek of what you're going to see in the gardens as well. So you can see here, it's sort of the wonderful, this is the formal French garden here, and then if you look off into the distance, you see the beautiful fields, the woods, the follies that are throughout the property. The property is over 100 acres of, and of those around 80 acres are woods, and then the rest are the wonderful fields and follies. So that's just gonna be a little peek, and we'll show you more later. Let's go back inside, and you can sort of see again how this gallery opens up onto the different principal living rooms on the house. So from the gallery and then the yellow salon, we're going to go into the library, and it's one of my favorite rooms in the house. From this bright, sunny room, we go into a much darker, moodier room. This is the library. It has only one window, one north-facing window, and so I decided to purposely make this a room that's very dramatic and a little darker. This room is all from the Empire period. This was installed in around 1802, and it's got beautiful, again, beautiful carved detailing, all from the Empire period. You see the motif of eagles and the beautiful sort of more Egyptian motifs that was so common during the Empire period. The two mirrors, there are two mirrors here that were original to the chateau, and the other walls all had upholstery in it. When I took the upholstery off, I discovered that there originally had been antique mirrors behind. So they were no longer there, so I had them all made and replaced to exactly match the existing antique mirrors, because what it does is it makes it even more sort of beautiful at night to have the light reflecting off of all these mirrors. And mirrors are such a wonderful trick from the 18th century. What they do is they open up a room, they make it feel bigger, and they expand the room because of the reflection of the light in the room. Again, I wanted this to be very cozy. So in some ways, it's more of an English country house in terms of the decoration and the feel. So it's big overstuffed furniture. This rug is one that I designed. It's actually made out of hides, cow hides, but it was actually taken from the Empire period, and so all the detailing is appropriate for the period of the room. From this room, we're going to go to one of the brighter rooms in the house. So we get from a very bright room to a darker room to another really lovely bright room, which is my study next door. So let's go next door. As you can see, there's sort of a hidden door here. If this was closed, you might not even know that there was a door here. So it's called a jib door, and we're going to go in, and we're going to go into the study next door. So this is my study, and this is just sort of a glorious room because it's on the end of the chateau. It has doors facing to the north and then these two windows facing to the east. These rooms were also installed in the, the paneling in these rooms were also installed in around 1802, 1803. Again, all the beautiful carved detailing in the room. Again, had to use heat guns to strip off all the paint to get back to the beautiful details, and you can sort of see here the details of the serpents and the skin on the serpents and the smoke coming out of the burners. So again, all out of this beautiful carved wood and the detailing on the ceiling. The yellow was original to this chateau, so I actually had it matched and repainted exactly. This room had been done all sort of in grays, but I wanted to make it feel fresher and a little brighter, so I did it all in traditional 18th century blues. And you can see on the beautiful floor, you can see the initials of the people who, the family who actually had this installed. So again, beautiful, beautiful detailing in this room. Because I'm a designer, an architect, all of the detailing, all the art in the room is based on architectural details and sort of fits what my profession is. So from here, I think I would like to take you back to the other end of the house. And so you see some of the public rooms first, and then I'm going to show you some of the more private rooms in the house. And then the petit salon. And again, so you see all the colors sort of work together and are harmoniously together. And we go from here into the entrance hall again. From here, I'm going to take you into the dining room. There are two dining rooms. I'm going to take you into the grand dining room. It's a really wonderful room full of beautiful carved detailing as well. When I bought the chateau, I think there were only four bathrooms in the entire chateau. I really wanted to update it, so now I think there are 18 bathrooms in the chateau. Each bedroom has its own bathroom, and there are powder rooms everywhere. I just want to show you this one that I was able to sneak in under the stairs. So it's a wonderful little jewel box of a powder room. With, as you can see, all this beautiful wallpaper. This is wallpaper that I designed for the English company From & Tall, and it's got this sort of dramatic feeling. I didn't want it to feel like too expected, so it's a little bit unusual. It's actually inspired by a 19th-century Japanese woodblock. And from here, we're going to go through these sort of two hidden doors, and we're going to go into the dining room. So here we are in the dining room, and it's a lovely room that, again, really shows the detailing of the beautiful boiserie in this chateau. You can look at the incredible boiserie here. It almost feels, it's three-dimensional. If someone were looking at it, they would think, oh my goodness, it's got to be plaster, it's got to be resin, because it's all this incredible detailing with the flowers and the bird and the fish everywhere. It's just incredible. So again, this all had to be treated and brought back to life to get all the details. There had originally been a tapestry here, but the former owners took the tapestry with them, so I actually found these five 18th-century panels that just fit into the walls perfectly. It's almost as if they were always meant to be there, that give a sense of the countryside. And again, I really wanted it to feel dramatic. So a dining room is predominantly used in the evening time, so I chose a color that was actually from the paintings, but also one that makes everyone look really beautiful in the evening, because by candlelight, that's what makes such a difference for dinner, is that you want everyone to feel their very best. I wanted to take the drama of the place as well, so I actually found, this is a trim that was made for the opera house at the Palais de Versailles and there was some extra when they had it made, so I actually bought it here and it gives that sort of wonderful drama to the room that makes it feel even more grand. So it's a wonderful, cozy dining room and you can see this wonderful stove. It's an 18th-century stove that would have been the original heat for the room. Dining rooms very often in France in the 18th century had these Swedish stoves because it gave an even distributed heat, whereas a fireplace can actually feel too hot. This is one that gives a nice, even heat and the twin to this oven or stove is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So again, you can see the beautiful detailing here. I wanted to install air conditioning throughout the entire chateau and I was lucky enough to have worked on the American Embassy and Ambassador's Residence in Paris and where we added heating and air conditioning. We were able to figure out ways to let the air conditioning and the air come through without having to have ugly vents, ugly grills, and without having to drop the ceiling. So I used those same techniques we learned there, here. So now actually, if you feel, there's actually cool or warm air that comes out right through this hole right here because there's a duct that's hidden behind. So you get all those amenities of the 21st century without having to make them look like it. So it truly continues to look and feel like an 18th century chateau. So outside of the dining room was this long corridor. The purpose of this corridor was that the staff could go through and service the rest of the house without disturbing people who are having dinner in the main dining room. And it's got this wonderful corridor with all these lovely south-facing windows. From here, we're going to go into what was the kitchen of the chateau that was installed in the 19th century. Originally, as was very common in the 17th, 18th century chateaus, kitchens were in another building because of fear of fire. So at some point in the 19th century, a kitchen was fitted into this room. It was a little too small for the way I wanted to live, so I'll show you how I transformed it, and then I'll show you what is the new kitchen in the chateau. So you see this, it's a lovely room. It has these lovely French doors going out. This was a solid wall before. So it was really just this room. You couldn't enter into that room. And so I transformed this into the crystal storage room. So it's got this wonderful armoire, which I found at the Paris flea market, filled with crystal and with china. And we open up onto this room, which is now the small breakfast room. This room was originally the chapel of the chateau. It was a very dark and depressing space. This was a solid wall. This opening was not here. Where these French doors are was a stained glass window. Even the doors over here did not have any windows on it. So if that didn't make it dark enough, it was also all dark, dark wood. So it was not a very happy place to come. And I decided that because you could only enter it before from going outside, it only had the one door, I decided I probably wouldn't use the space very much. So I really thought hard about, gee, what do I do with it? So I finally decided that I would not keep it as a chapel. I had it desanctified, and I turned it into this wonderful, light, bright space by opening up, having this arch here, the French doors that were added here, and then painting it all, the beautiful sort of light white color, but accentuating the beautiful architectural details with a light blue. All the gilding you see in the room is original to the chateau, but it was all against the dark wood. The original chapel, I'm sorry, the original altar is 18th century, it's Venetian. And so I decided to keep that, and now serves as a wonderful place to serve breakfast. And there are incredible, again, incredible carved details. This is all beautifully carved out of wood. It's those details that make this such a special chateau. What's interesting is behind this door is actually served as the confessional. So the chateau had its own priest, and the people would come, and the family would come and give their confession. Because it was their own priest, I'm sure that there was not a lot of confidentiality. I don't know why that screen was even there, because everyone probably knew exactly who was doing the confessing. But it adds a sort of fun detail. I wanted to maintain that. From here, we're going to pass into another space that I've created, and it was what was called the sacristy. And it was the area where the priest's vestments, and where the vestments for the altar were kept. And I'll show you how I've transformed that. So this space actually, the space right here was here, but there was a long hallway here. And what's interesting is I now turned it into sort of the flower arranging room. So it's got all those wonderful pots and things like that. But this is where the vestments were kept. And so this looks like a very shallow little cupboard, but it actually, it's very deep. It goes all fully into the wall. And this is where all the vestments were kept. This is where I now keep all the linens. But you can see this, for example, was noir for the black, and this one was violet. So they were all there as vestments. So it's a wonderful place to have as a service area just off of the small dining room and what is the new kitchen next door. So this arch was not here. None of this opening was here. And this room, which is interesting, this room was originally, which is now the kitchen, was originally where the hunt breakfast was held. It was where after people would go out hunting for deer or for rabbit, they'd come back and they would actually prepare the meal here in what was a big fireplace where there would be a spit and the meal was prepared here. I decided to turn this into a kitchen because it's got wonderful windows going out onto the gardens where I was also created a terrace. And I made it feel very much like a new kitchen, but one that is also old. So I found all these 18th century Dutch Delft tiles to line the whole space. And again, give it some sense of history while it's still very much a 21st century kitchen. From here, I'd like to show you where I've created some places to sit outside. So none of this area was actually here. It was just field here, but I sort of created this whole place to come sit outside, a wonderful cozy place right off of the kitchen, right off the small breakfast room, and then created out of this fountain and detailing to make it a place where you'd want to come and hang out. Again, what's so important here is I did not want it to feel like it was a museum. I wanted it to make it feel like it was a historical place, but one that is very much for the way people live today. So let's go from the kitchen. We're going to show you some of the other sort of back of house. And every country house needs to have a mudroom, a place to come take off your boots and take off all the grime and dirt from outside. And so where we are now was we're actually in the West Tower Hallway, and I wanted to continue the detailing of this idea of stone blocks. I found this wonderful wallpaper, and this is a wonderful drawing that shows the entire property. All of the gardens were redesigned in the early 20th century or late 19th century by a man named Edouard André. André was one of the most important landscape architects of France in the 19th century. He's most famous for designing the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. And in fact, he was doing the Tuileries Gardens at the same time that he was doing this chateau. So he took the gates from the old Tuileries Palace and relocated them here. So we've got that bit of history as well, but you can see the wonderful sense of the chateau and all the gardens that are here, and that are still here today. From here, we're gonna go into the mudroom, and it is, again, it's like this room was not here. This was actually a boiler room. I put it in this wonderful floor, and you can see we've got the prerequisite wellies that you need to have for any country house. One final thing I'd like to show you here is I am, this is not my first chateau. This is actually my fourth chateau. People have sort of called me a chateauholic. I love the process of finding these old sleeping beauties, bringing them back to life, and restoring them for the way we live today. My first chateau was this chateau, Chateau Blanville, just outside of Paris. My second was one called Galeron, and this is my third chateau, Grand Luce. Again, so it's such so much fun to learn about the history of these old buildings, to learn about how the people lived them in the past, and how you make them appropriate for the future. So we're back here in the West Hall, and there are two different towers that were added, and they have staircases on each side. So these were from the 17th century, so you sort of see the more rustic aspect of the wood, whereas the main staircase in the center is 18th century. So we're gonna go back through the house to the other wing, because I wanna show you a very special room, which is my bedroom. So let's go there. So we're back in this long corridor, which is next to the dining room, and from here, we go into the entrance hall, and back through the chateau to the other side. So just as a reminder, we're coming back from the library, back into my study, and we're going to go into really what is sort of now more of the private section of the house. So this is at the far end of the chateau. The kitchen was way at the other end. So what I did is I decided to make another small kitchen over here, which makes it easy if I'm in the study or people are in the library to come and get refreshments. So here in the East Tower, I created another small little kitchen area. You can see the original, again, one of the original 18th century stoves, which was used to heat the room. And rather than do it in a traditional 18th century sort of style, I actually took an 18th century Indian style wallpaper. And so you really get to feel the sense that you've been transfixed and transformed into another space. This is a beautiful custom wallpaper, which I had done from the wonderful company Excel in London. But again, it's this sort of cozy little space where you can come and get refreshments when you're on this side and you don't wanna have to walk the mile over to the other side of the chateau for the kitchen over there. So again, it's not very French to have lots of bathrooms, but I have them everywhere. So you can see another powder room here. I mean, this one's done in the 18th century chinoiserie style of the beautiful detailing of the chinoiserie. And throughout the whole chateau, rather than having traditional vanities, I took old 18th century commodes and turned them into the vanities for sinks. From here, we're going to go into what is part of the 17th century section of the chateau. And you'll see that the floors are a little lower. But I wanted to do is I wanted to create a wonderful suite on the ground floor for guests to use. So we're gonna go into this suite. And you can see even the doorways are very low because it's 17th century. So this, it's a little more rustic here. You can see the floors have this 17th century tonnette, the terracotta floors. But I wanted to create this sort of wonderful little cozy sitting room here. And then a wonderful bedroom next door. So this has windows facing both the east and the west, four windows, and it really creates a wonderful, cozy suite. I added the plasterwork ceiling, which was appropriate for the 18th century. And to make it feel, again, a little more grand. Because it has lower ceilings than you're gonna find in the other rooms, I decided I had to up the grandeur level a little bit. But it does have this original fireplace from the 17th century as well. Next door, you'll see, was originally another bedroom. And you'll see how I transformed it into a glorious bathroom. So this room, which is huge, has got, again, for French doors going out to the west, French doors going out to the east, is now a big bathroom with shower, separate water closet, and then tub and vanity. All the tubs I bought actually from, they were from the old Ritz Hotel in Paris when they were redoing them. I was able to buy them all at auction. So there are these wonderful antique tubs as well. From here, we're going to take you to one of the most special rooms in the house. And that is my bedroom. And it's not special because it's my bedroom. It's special because it's architecturally just a true feat. So let's go over to that room. So where we're going now, we're actually leaving the chateau itself. We're going to what was an artist's studio that was added in the 19th century. And it was attached to this little corridor. On one side of the corridor were the original 17th century farm buildings, the stables, et cetera. And then there was an artist's studio that was put at the end of this space. And when I walked into the space, I was just blown away. So let's go in and I'll show you that space. In this corridor, I filled the walls full of art, of architecture. Again, in keeping with my field, I wanted to fill the sense that we're going to my territory of the chateau. So I filled it with art that represents my passion. So this was the original artist's studio. And it was a room that I just came in and I thought, oh my gosh, it's amazing. With these 17-foot ceilings and this incredible openness with windows all facing to the north, east, and west. It was such a spectacular room and I thought, but what am I going to do with this room? I mean, I don't need another living room. I don't need another place to hang out. But I knew it was so special that I needed to figure out a destination, a reason to come here. So I thought, what better use of the room but to make it my master bedroom? So it's, again, this wonderful space. Originally, there was glass ceilings here because it was an artist's studio. During the Second World War, the glass ceilings broke. So it had been somewhat abandoned in that respect. So I actually lowered the ceilings somewhat. That allowed me to get the air conditioning and the heating in without it being noticeable. And then I added all the trellis work, the triage work all around the base to make it feel more like a garden room. I also, I designed this wallpaper. This is all wallpaper that I designed for the English company Fromatol and it's called Jardin Francais. So it depicts formal French gardens, which I thought was a perfect way to showcase this sort of wonderful garden room. The stone floors are all original, but I decided to cover them with seagrass because I wanted it to feel not too fussy, not too formal, and a little more casual because it's such a grand room that you needed to figure out how to also ground it and make it feel more livable. This chandelier is actually six feet tall. It doesn't look that big because the room is so tall. But again, it's got all that wonderful grandeur. And then you can see the ciel de lit, or the bed crown. This was actually a pulpit from a church and I had it painted and fit. You can see here the family crest again. And I love this, you can see these wonderful, the two dogs protecting the family crest. And the family crest is very interesting because it represents, each bird represents one century of service to the kings of France. And if the beak is broken or the section of the beak gone, that means that that family, during that one century, sustained some injuries in service to the king. If the feet are missing, that means that they actually had a death in their family in service to the king of France. You can see here, here's three centuries of service to the king, three centuries with no beaks or injuries in service of France and with no feet. So that means they lost lives, all in service of France. And they were very proud of this fact that they had served the kingdom so long that it actually became a part of the family crest. And you'll see this crest throughout the chateau. Because this was an artist studio, there was no bathroom here. So that became a bit of a complex issue of where do I put a bathroom? I didn't want to chop up this beautiful architectural space. So behind us were some of the stables. So the horse stables still exist, but there was livestock stables as well. And what I did was I actually opened up a door from this space into the stables, the former stables, and turned it into a dressing room. So let's go in there and I'll show you that space as well. You can see, this is what's called the jib door. It's sort of like a hidden door. You wouldn't necessarily know it's there, but you go in. So here we are in my dressing room and bathroom. I decided to continue the beautiful parquet de Versailles that's found throughout the chateau. I added it here in the bathroom as well. And it's a wonderful space. Again, imagine, and you can see here the photos of what it looked like when it was originally stables. You can see the closet area is all hidden behind a zubair, wallpaper panels from the Hindustan series. And then I created this private garden out here. So I have my own little private space as well. So these stairs were added. These were not here because the stables used to be entered on this lower level. And you can sort of see here, you start to see some of the 17th century farm buildings. You see, I decided to keep the second door to the stables, even though that's actually now my dressing room. But then you see this section here where the actual current stables still exist. And you can start to see some of the beautiful architecture of the farm buildings from the 17th century. From here, I created this private garden and I'm actually in the process of putting a big fountain in right here, but it's shielded from the rest of the chateau with this new hedge. And when you come out here, you start to get a sense of some of the magnificence of the park and of the follies off in the distance. And again, I love these wonderful old sequoia trees. And this is one of the things that's really special about the grounds is that the landscape architect, he diverted the stream, which comes here. It served as the moat. And he diverted, part of it goes that way and another part of it goes this way. And he created this wonderful half mile long canal, which is very similar to the one that's found at Versailles. This, the chateau is often called the Versailles of the fields because it has a lot of the same elements of Versailles, but it's in a much more relaxed setting. So you have the wonderful fields, you have the boat house folly off in the distance and the woods beyond that. So let's go back inside. Interestingly enough, this little house here was the original bathroom for the 17th century. This little outhouse was the one bathroom from the 17th century. I absolutely love taking baths. So I found the biggest, longest bath I could find and I centered it right on these doors. And so that in the summertime, I could have a bath looking out at this incredible gardens. You can see again, start to see the canals here, the wonderful little bridge. And I centered this sculpture of a stag directly on access with the bathtub. And you can see he's, it's as if he's just come in from the woods and it's just sitting on that hedge off in the distance. But it, again, it's that aspect of creating visual focal points from the chateau, which are so important because it wants, it gets you to want to go outside and explore the grounds. From here, we're going to go up to the, what's called the premier attage or the second floor in America. And we'll show you some of the bedrooms upstairs. So let's go upstairs. And again, up this beautiful balustrade. And you start to see, again, you see the family crest on all the, even on the stairs. So here are the three birds with the missing beaks and the missing feet. On the staircase, I wanted to accentuate, again, the drama of the space. So I actually, I had this three-tier lantern done. What that does is it actually helps elevate your eye and make you appreciate the grandeur of the space. As I mentioned, there are pictures in here are filled with family members. This is my grandmother here. Here is a drawing of my father from his university fraternity days. Here's a picture of my great-grandmother when she was getting married. So it's wonderful to have that history of family mixed in with people that are total strangers. And I love that mixture of all that because it adds that much more mystery and drama to the space. From here, we're going to go and visit some of the bedrooms on this floor. Originally, there was only one bathroom on this entire floor. I've transformed it so that I've taken what were seven bedrooms into now four bedrooms, each with its en suite bathroom. So let's visit the first one. I intentionally wanted to make each bedroom feel unique and different. So not only is the configuration a little different because of the needs of the space, but from a personality standpoint, each one is a little different as well. And I named each room. This first room is called Champ de Pompadour. So this is a very feminine room. It's all beautiful pinks and greens. So here we are in the Champ de Pompadour. And again, it's just, you can see, it's wonderful, this beautiful paneling. It's very rare in Chateau to have the paneling in all three levels. So again, often many chateaus would have the boiserie or the paneling on the ground floor, but then on the next floor, it might have just wainscoting and then wallpaper above. That's one of the things that made this chateau so special was the paneling on all the floors. And you can sort of see the details, for example, of this, the beautiful, the bed crown. And again, because I'm all about practicality, the fabrics are actually, this is one of my outdoor fabrics. So you don't have to worry about when guests spill. They can do that. When I originally did this room, I had a very ornate 18th century rug in the room, but it felt too much. It felt sort of too formal. So I decided to take it out and put in this simple rush matting. And again, it's that mixture of the grandeur with the casual, which makes it feel more intimate and livable. Because there was only one bathroom for this entire level, these actually were doors to a little closet. It now leads to the room, the former bedroom, which is now the bathroom next door. So this is one of the smaller bathrooms in the chateau because again, I had to work with the individual spaces. I maintained all the original wood floors, et cetera, but this became a wonderful bathroom. And again, while it's small, I made up for it with beautiful details with this beautiful hand-painted sink set into this 18th century commode. And while it may not be the biggest bathroom, it's got a full walk-in closet. So when I tell people, I let them choose their rooms, I already have an idea of which ones they're going to choose because some people come with lots of clothes. That's the room for them. Other people love to take baths. That's the one for them. From this room, we're going to go to another bedroom, which is not one of the bigger rooms, but it's probably one of my favorites. And it's one of my favorites because it has windows that open out beautifully onto the garden. So it has this wonderful little foyer. And then you go into this room, which has windows, two windows facing east, one facing to the north, and the most incredible views out onto the gardens. This room also has incredible paneling. And so I decided to accentuate it here with three different colors of paint. And again, those three different colors of paint let you appreciate the details of the paneling that much more. And I picked the colors for this room from this original painting that was here from the 18th century, where you can see these colors, the reds and the creams. And that's what gave me the impetus of how to do the coloration in this room. The rug, again, is made out of hide. It's from my collection for Kyle Bunting. And it's, again, based on an 18th century design. So it's, again, it's just a wonderfully cozy room with all these wonderful views. I'll show you the bathroom next door. So again, not one of the bigger bathrooms in the chateau. It only has a shower, but it's just, again, you just feel so cozy and enveloped by the wonderful 19th century wallpaper in the room. Let's go visit another room. This one is called Champs d'Alais, and it's because it looks out onto one of the alleys of linden trees at the back of the house. As you can see in this room, this was the original alcove de lit, or bed alcove. So I decided to maintain that. As was traditional in these kinds of rooms, this is where the chamber pot would have been. And then this would have been the place to actually to get undressed the closet. This has, again, all the original 18th century paneling, the original 18th century chimney and fireplace. And as I mentioned before, the heating and the air conditioning all comes out now through the ducting of the fireplaces. So again, you don't have to have the noise of the air coming out, or you have to have the grills. I transformed the room next door, which had been another bedroom, into the bathroom. So each bedroom is en suite, and you can see there's this little corridor, and then we go into the bathroom beyond. So this, again, as I said, was a small bedroom, and it now serves as a bathroom, but you can see it's got the original parquet de Versailles, another one of the bathtubs from the Hotel Ritz, another commode from the 18th century transformed into a vanity. And what I did is, for all the water closets, there actually had been these windows. The windows served a purpose. They actually let light into an interior room from the corridor outside. So now that's the water closet, and this door, which used to lead to a little vestibule, which went out to the hallway, now serves as the shower. So you wouldn't even know that it was here. Once this is closed, this just all looks like a fully paneled room, but it serves as a sort of wonderful bathroom that has all the amenities of the people want today, and yet there it is, nestled into this wonderful little 18th century paneled room. I'm always in the process of adding additional portraits as I find them. So here's one that I've actually just found, an 18th century pastel, which is going to be hung right here on the wall. So it's a continually evolving process. The life in a chateau is never static. You're never really done. You're always continuing to evolve and grow. And so that's how I'm doing that here. You can see here, you can see the beautiful, this is the one bit of plaster work in the chateau. This is not a carved wood. This is actually plaster ceiling. The three tier lantern that I installed actually weighs more than a ton. So I had to reinforce the ceiling to be able to support the weight of this chandelier. As you can see here on the third floor, the ceilings are lower. And so this is a more intimate space. This would have been, these are the less grand rooms, but I decided it was very important that you don't want people to feel that they're in a lesser room. So I did little tricks and things to make them feel even more special. So let's go visit the first one. So this is called Chambre de la Tour, or the room of the tower. It's because we're actually just next to the west tower of the chateau. And again, the details here are wonderful. You start to see some of the beautiful paneling. And I put these little mirror insets into the overdoors to help brighten the space. And again, this is, I chose blue and white. Blue is the very favorite color of people around the world. So there are actually a couple of different blue bedrooms here. But this one is actually, I used my fabric for Schumacher here called Cap Ferrat to create this sort of wonderful sense of happiness and ambiance. I mentioned that the process of a chateau is continually evolving. And as a designer, I'd like to continue to change things around. So I would want to show you my storeroom for pillows alone. So you can sort of see, I've got all these different cushions and pillows all ready to go in case I decide to change the decor in one of the rooms. I'd like to show you one of the little pavilions that I've transformed into an informal dining room. It was originally one of the gatehouses of the gatekeepers of the chateau, but it's now an informal dining room. So here inside the second set of gates of the chateau were these two gatehouses. I needed to totally rebuild the roofs because they were actually literally falling in. And so what was a two-story structure, I opened up and became a single story, took out the central staircase, and I stripped off all the plaster off the walls and returned it to this sort of wonderful rubble walls. And what I created in here is a wonderful little rustic outdoor summer dining space. I've had dinners out here, I've had cocktails out here in the evening, and it makes it just sort of this wonderful, unusual, and unexpected space because it's got all this rusticity. It's not what you were expecting with the formality of the interior of the chateau. I actually took this fireplace, which is more formal, this was actually in what was my bedroom of the chateau, and what used to be the artist studio, and I put it out here to have this wonderful fireplace out here. But it creates this wonderful ambience, and you can see the beautiful restored ceiling, which I had to redo all of the structure of the ceiling, but I love that details of seeing all the natural wood up on the ceiling. I'm afraid that's all we've got time for today, so I won't be able to show you everything around the chateau. If we had more time, I would show you the potager, I'd show you the number of the follies throughout the woods, and some of the over 150 different sculptures that I've added throughout the gardens and the park to help bring it back to life. But thank you so much for your time today, and I hope you've enjoyed this tour of Chateau de la Chavarie.