A Tour of This Stunning French Castle: Part 2

Six years ago, I left my life in England behind. I joined my family to take on the daunting task of restoring this stunning French Chateau. Three years later, I started a YouTube channel. And since then, we've shared our story with viewers all around the world. And not forgetting all the friends who've helped us along the way. We do everything ourselves, from restoring the gardener's cottage, maintaining the huge forest and estate, to restoring the grand interiors back to the way they were over 100 years ago. A lot has changed, but we've barely scratched the surface. Our journey here has only just begun. My name's Michael, and I'll be your host for this amazing adventure. This is Doing It Ourselves. OK, so welcome to the Chateau's grand dining room. Now, this is an impressive space designed to entertain even the most prestigious guests. And this is where they would have served banquets and meals. And I believe the family would have probably eaten in here daily as well. Back in the day when they had a servant's kitchen and they had staff to serve food for them. But we are the servants these days, so we have to serve ourselves and cook for ourselves. But here it is. Now, you'll notice, if you come in, that every single room on the ground floor of this Chateau is in a different style from a different period. So the entrance hall is Gothic Revival, which is from the 19th century. And we are in now the dining room, which is in the Renaissance style, which is Henri II, Henry II of France, the King of France. A lot of quite solid square looking carvings with sort of acanthus leaf details and egg and darts. But we'll have a look at that. So just behind me is is the centerpiece of this Chateau. It is a grand fireplace surround made from solid oak, all hand carved. And it was actually commissioned by the by the owner that had the Chateau before it was rebuilt, but it was never installed. It was in storage and he had it commissioned. And obviously, when they rebuilt the Chateau, they had the room designed around this fireplace. Now, in the center is a bronze plaque by Devleux, a very famous French sculptor, and he made statues for the Louvre, which is now the museum in Paris and also Versailles. He did carve statues from marble. He also made bronze sculptures. And this is a bronze plaque commissioned especially for this fireplace. It's absolutely beautiful. It shows in the center, it shows I think she's called Amphitrite, which is the goddess of the sea. And she was the wife of Poseidon. And I used to think it was Aphrodite because she's seen here emerging from the waves in a shell, which is normally the way you would see Aphrodite. But this is actually not Aphrodite, it's Amphitrite because she's holding a trident. It's what Poseidon had, he had a trident, trident, trident. A trident, yes. And so she's there emerging from the waves with the tridents in a shell surrounded by cherubim, bristling waves. And she's in, she's in a beautiful repose, leaning back. So it's very nonchalant. Here, which is really interesting, I can't reach because it's so, so big. And I'm not that short. I'm about five foot nine and a half, I think. And even I can't reach there. So there is here, there is it's like a staff, a winged staff surrounded by snakes. And that is used nowadays as a symbol for for medical things. But actually, originally it was the it was the symbol of Hermes, the messenger god. So that is there on either side and there's flowers. You've got laurel leaves here and you've got oak leaves on the right hand side. If you look just up there, the tiny beehives and at the top, the crowning glory is a carved oak green man, which is like a pagan god of the forest and of nature. So he's obviously depicted as an old man with beard, but his beard and hair are actually leaves. So the oak leaves here and he's got some laurel leaves in his hair. It's very special. And there are some other bronze sculptures up top either side. There's two female figures either side just hiding there. We don't know who they are. They're obviously some other goddesses that would probably have worked for Ambritrite. So there you go. That's an amazing thing. And here, fleur de lis, which is the symbol of the kings of France, a royal symbol, fleur de lis, sorry, fleur de lis. Actually, in English, we would say fleur de lis, but in France, it's actually fleur de lis, which means the lily flower. I feel like I'm waffling on here. So, yeah, so that's the big dining room table. That's the fireplace. Very, very interesting. If you care to come and stand here and look up. This may be the biggest chandelier that you've ever seen. Probably the biggest chandelier I've ever seen that's not in a theater or or a public building. Billy bought this and he had to drive all the way to the south of France, which is probably about a 10 hour drive. And it was when they got it, it was it was destroyed. It was black. The metal was black. There was arms had been snapped off and there were no crystals on it. So we stripped all the metal back. Me and Billy rewired it ourselves. Billy purchased all of these crystals. These are Albert Spears. The only place you could have a big chandelier like this on the ground floor is above a dining table, because anyone over my height, probably one is about six foot, would just knock, knock their head on these crystals. So we put it over the dining table and it's the centerpiece for this room. To buy something like that in that condition would would be ridiculous money. You know, we're talking tens of thousands. But Billy, it cost him probably a couple of thousand. Because we restored ourselves and an interesting story. This you look at the floor here. Look at that. Look at the floor. I look at the floor. Follow me. Follow me as I walk. I'm still on the carpet. There we go. So this absolutely massive carpet is a slightly smaller replica of a carpet that's in the Victoria and Albert Museum. And it's known as the Ardabil carpet. Persian rug. Very, very famous one. I think the colors in the original are slightly different, but the actual pattern on this is exactly the same as the Ardabil carpet. And I think this one is slightly shorter than the original, but it's the same width and Billy bought it for. Well, it's the size of this room, bought it for 300 euros. 300 euros for that. You could. How does he find stuff that cheap? As I said earlier, I think it's I think it's a case of. Nobody will buy a carpet this big because they'd have to cut it into four pieces to get it into a normal house. So things like this, which were designed for grand, massive buildings, you can actually get them quite cheap if you know where to look because nobody else wants them. People want them, but they don't have room for them. And this cabinet also Billy bought, this is a buffet, but you call it a buffet in oak in the Renaissance style. Henri de Henry, the second Renaissance French style. It's a place to display glassware, China. And you'd also you would serve. Now, years ago, you would have staff. They may have served you a la Rousse, which is lots of courses, which usually you'd have a footman or something would carry a tray around. Always serve from the left. I think we serve from the left. And then somebody would bring a tray of food for each course. And you would have some serving spoons and you'd take what you wanted and then they'd go to the next person. Or you can have a different style of serving, which is a buffet style. And they probably would have what they would have done is they would have put the food on here. Whereas years ago, they actually before they did the Alarou style, they actually used to just put everything on the table like a feast. But then they stopped doing the feast and they did the Russian style, which was a slice of dainty courses. But yeah, so originally they would have just piled it up with food, all displayed suckling pigs, you name it, fruit and vegetables and everything. So just stuff. But yeah, so they became a bit more posh than they did that stuff. So that's what that's for. That's a buffet. And underneath, you've got places to store china, glassware at the ends, cutlery in here. But they wouldn't have kept the silver cutlery in here. They would have kept that downstairs in the butler's pantry. And the butler was always in charge of the wine and the silverware. So that's the dining room. It's a beautiful room. And before we go, I'm going to give you one last little bit of information about the ceiling. If you care to pan up, look at the ceiling. There we have a solid oak ceiling. That's not solid oak at all. It's actually plaster that's painted to look like oak. So that ceiling, it's so convincing. Even I couldn't believe it when I had to get up there on a ladder and find an area where some paint had come off. And it was indeed plaster underneath. Every single wood grain in every different panel is different. It's not like a rolly thing that you have nowadays. Each piece of wood grain is individual, like real wood. I don't know how they did it, but you can see what the ceiling looks like there is how the library cabinet in there would have been exactly the same at once, once upon a time. So what we're going to do now is going to go into the billiards room, which is in the east wing, which is the room next to the entrance hall. So if you follow me, we're going to go there now and we'll tell you about that room. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to our billiards room. Just do this. That was perfect. Hole in one. It's actually really funny because we were we were planning to we were planning to actually I was going to pop the ball and if I missed, would film it for real, actually going in the hole. But he just actually went in. That was a perfect shot. So this is the billiards room. It was designed originally as the billiards room, but we didn't have the table. But it's in the style of arts and crafts with a sort of hint of art deco in the woodwork and the carving and stuff. So, yeah, for years we used this as a living room. We used to have sofas and rugs and television in here. But the idea was that one day we would find the perfect billiards or pool table. And Billy found one. It's actually English, and it is probably twice the size of a normal pool table, which makes playing quite difficult because you've got to you've got to you've got to make the balls go a lot further. And and yeah, so it's it's it's it's now used for its correct purpose. There's not a lot of space around the edge. And the problem is, if you're in this corner, the wall's in the way. So I think it was designed for a slightly smaller table, but nonetheless, bigger is always better when it comes to chateaus. Apparently, the thing is, this room has changed quite a lot over the years. It's not its original color scheme. And now we have blue curtains and there's a blue wallpaper by Sanderson. But actually, originally, these walls were hung with tapestries. But unfortunately, years ago, there was an owner that owned the chateau and she disappeared. Nobody knew where she was. And this place was left abandoned. And squatters moved in and they vandalized the place. They didn't cause much structural damage, but what they did is they took cans of spray paint and spray painted all the tapestries, which is which is terrible because they were 100 years old and they were actually in good condition, apart from being a bit dusty. They were destroyed and they had to be removed. So it would be nice to put a wallpaper back in here that has the feel of a tapestry, but we'll get to that one day. There's so much more important things that need to be done besides finding new wallpapers. But yeah, here it is. So I'll give you a few shots of the room and then we'll move into the Grand Salon and we'll have a look at that now. Let's go. Well, that door's a bit stiff. So welcome to the chateau's Grand Salon. The the style in this room is, as you can see, it's very gold. It's very cream. There's lots of lovely wooden floors and the curtains are very, very pretty. And you can see you've got all of this gilt edging. Now, originally, these these inserts here would have been filled with a fabric like a silk or something, which might be something we could put back. But what somebody's done is actually they just put some plywood in there. But it's hollow underneath. And actually, when we first moved here, this room was a like a not a very nice pale blue, like an eggshell blue. And it just didn't look very nice. There was no gold. So what we did is one of the first things we did is actually painted the whole thing cream. Now, there was actually you won't notice, but there were actually two colors. This part and the part inside the panels is a different color. It might not show on camera, but it's this part's a little bit dark and these parts are lighter. And I had to get some gold paint and I had to. It took me months by hand with no masking tape. I had to paint all of the gold pieces by hand with a special gilding paint. And here they are. We've got lovely curtains now. There's a little table here with some refreshments. Should you need something to drink? And we've got a piano which we can use to entertain our guests. And just over here, we've got a nice canopy, which is means a little sofa in France with some chairs. So got nice little areas. This room will eventually be if Billy and Gwen move back, it will be the living room for the chateau. Just it's just missing maybe a nicer sofa, like a suite, something a bit more comfortable. And it needs rugs and things like that. It'd be nice if the heating was on, but it's not on at the minute. We've got one more room. I can show you it, but it's full of junk at the minute. It's not really set up for public view, but we'll give you a little look in there anyway, have a nosy about. So we'll go in there now. OK, so welcome. This is the office. We've got the double doors here that go through into the salon. And now this room is the only room on the ground floor that actually. It's nowhere near finished. It needs a lot more work. Billy has actually started some work, but he now is renovating the convent. So there's nobody here to do the work. So I say there's nobody here. I'm here. So now that means I've got to take over. So you've got these beautiful fabric panels. Now, originally underneath, there were just if you look here, it's just wood. Somebody put some horrible wallpaper on it and then they put plywood over the top of that. It's just a mess. But you can see here that years ago there would have been fabric pinned to the wall. You can see the nails there. And actually, this little piece of border would have covered it or you'd had some some braiding or something to cover the edge. But Billy had started replacing it with this fabric here. The gold and you can see the color scheme in this room is exactly the same as next door. It's just gold and white or off white like a cream. So just behind me, you can see that these doors are actually new. Now, what happened is years ago, this place was owned by a man and he wanted to run it as a wedding venue. So he in order to have a great big indoor room that you could have like wedding breakfasts and parties and things like that. He ripped this wall out and made it into one big room. But you can see the floors here are on two different levels and the patterns are different. What we've done is we've actually put the wall back. But unfortunately, some parts of the walls, which were like these beautiful arches behind me, the gilt arches with the scallop shells and things like that. They're actually missing. When Billy and Gwen first viewed the chateau, those missing pieces from the wall were actually upstairs in a bedroom. But between the time that they left the place and while it was up for sale, they used to have a caretaker that lived here and a lot of stuff mysteriously disappeared while he was here. And they went with it, unfortunately. So they are gone and we are having a really hard time replacing them. But yeah, so we better put the wall back. But there was there was a blessing in disguise by having this wall ripped out and then putting it back. And that is Billy actually managed to hide a waste pipe for the toilets in this tower above inside this new wall, because years ago there was no plumbing up there for toilets. And now we've managed to hide a pipe in the wall so that now we can have toilets in this wing and all the en-suites, which is fantastic. So there's a blessing in disguise, but it's a shame that we've lost some of the original features, but we'll just have to replicate them. So that concludes today's tour. It was quite a long tour and we've only just done the ground floor. So in the next video, we'll take you to another part of this amazing chateau and we'll explore that. So I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for watching and I'll be back very soon.