There was one bedroom, four people, and a kitchen with exactly enough counter space to make a small sandwich (provided you committed fully to the sandwich and did not attempt anything else in the same hour). There was no yard or balcony. Not even a sad slab of concrete with a folding chair on it. The view from our window was the roof of the house next door and a petite tangle of power lines.

Now, to be fair, that apartment was a block from the beach, and that is not nothing. When we needed to go outside, we had a beautiful place to be. But the neighborhood was becoming increasingly dangerous, with more theft and break-ins, more violent crime, and taking two very small children out for a stroll started to feel like a chore rather than a pleasure.

Three years ago we left that little apartment, and today we live in a small château in northwest France. I'm aware that "small château" is a ridiculous phrase. It belongs in the same family as "casual black tie" and "a light snack before dinner." But bear with me.

The house is 2,863 square feet. 7 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, 11 acres, one river, one forest, one chapel in the trees.

In American terms, 2,863 square feet is a large suburban house. Likely someone reading this lives in one. The difference is that the large suburban house does not have two turrets on it, or a chapel in the woods, or a coach house that used to hold horse-drawn carriages.

Which is the thing I most want to say clearly before I say anything else: we did not buy more house. We bought more land, more history, and…more problems.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château and documenting it as it happens.

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Now, we did not go straight from the apartment to the castle. There was most definitely a middle step, and I recommend the middle step to everyone considering a similar move.

When we first arrived in France more than three years ago, we rented a farmhouse on the grounds of a very large château. Partly to get to know the country and the region before committing to either, and partly to observe château life from the safe distance of a tenant. This way we could peripherally observe authentic château ownership.

The farmhouse was a 3-bedroom longhouse (about 1,520 ft²), which is roughly three times the apartment we’d just left. We thoroughly enjoyed starfish-ing our way through all the extra space, spreading out and literally skipping down the hall at times. But the square footage inside almost paled in comparison to what was happening outside.

We now had an outside that was not only beautiful, varied, and safe, but also ours, and available to us at any given moment. There was a wall around our garden and inside that wall was a small eden of flowers and little trees, and just past it, a private forest, and past that, a small lake, and past that, the endless paths and fields of the French countryside. The kids could just open the door and go outside whenever they had the urge.

And we leaned in hard to our newly-given outdoor space. We put in a playhouse, a swing set, a trampoline, a chicken coop we filled with seven chickens (gifting us fresh eggs each morning). We also added a vegetable garden (which flourished beyond anything my Los Angeles countertop herbs had prepared me for), plus raspberries and wild blackberries and…the list goes on.

It was glorious. Then, about two years in to our rented famhouse life, we bought a castle. And now that we’re here? We live in about a third of it. Our bedrooms, the kitchen, a bathroom, and the living room are all on the first floor, and the four of us spend roughly 95% of our indoor life there. The other floors exist, yes, and we use them more when we have family visiting. We also have renovation plans for them (in due time). But day to day, we occupy a normal sized house that happens to be wearing a castle around it.

So, with all this space, it should be perfect! And mostly it is wonderful, and there is another side of this coin.

You might reasonably assume that the drawbacks of moving into a castle would be castle-shaped. A ghost, perhaps, or a portrait whose eyes follow you. Something atmospheric.

Here is what we actually got.

Drawback one: you will fill it, and it will not take you long

There’s some law about this, I’m certain of it. Something about if there is space, it will be filled. Give a family a room and they will produce enough belongings to justify the room, at speed.

At one point my husband Sean suggested (in the tone of a man approaching a subject delicately) whether I might have a buffet problem.

Now, I’m not talking about an all-you-can-eat buffet, with delicious waffles and fruit salad. I’m speaking of furniture. At one point, we had no less than seven buffets in our farmhouse.

Before the alarm is raised, I would like to enter two things into my defense. First, most old houses have no closets. None. Storage as a built-in concept simply had not occurred to anyone in the 17th century, and the solution then, as now, was furniture. You want your things somewhere? Buy a piece of furniture to put them in. Armoires, china cabinets, buffets. Second, the prices at our local donation shop were so absurd that walking past a gorgeous old French buffet for 40 euros started to feel less like restraint and more like stupidity.

So yes, we had at one time, seven buffets. I think we have only six now (😬) which I might say is a perfectly reasonable amount of buffets.

It was, to say the least, a different story in Los Angeles. Back in that little apartment, I kept The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo on my nightstand like a devotional text. Once a year I’d reread it and do the full cleanse, holding each object and asking whether it sparked joy (which sounds spiritual and was in fact structural, because we could not physically fit one more thing into that apartment). The size of the apartment gave us the discipline, and Marie Kondo was our divine minimalist guru.

I sometimes miss the limit. Being forced to keep only what was essential was a healthy practice that we’re now not inclined to follow.

I have mentioned Marie Kondo to at least three French people now and not one of them had heard of her. The whole global tidying phenomenon appears to have simply not landed here, and standing in one of these ancient stone houses, you understand why. There is room for everything, including the things that do not spark joy and never did and are currently living in buffet number four.

Drawback two: I cannot locate my husband.

There’s a RAYE song you may have heard called Where Is My Husband! and I would like her to know that it is not, for me, a metaphor. It has been my theme song for the past 9 months.

In the apartment, saying Sean’s name was sufficient. It was not possible for him to not hear me. Every room was the next room. You could be at “the far end of the house” and still be within about eleven feet of another human being.

The process here on the château grounds is different. I go to a west-facing window. “Sean?” Nothing. I try again, adding volume and a question mark that has begun to fray. “SEAN?“ Nothing. I walk to an east-facing window, lean out, call again. Nothing.

Because he could be anywhere! He could be at the gate house feeding the chickens, he could be at the orchard watering the fruit trees, or in the kitchen garden picking tomatoes, or in the coach house taking apart an appliance, or in the forest gathering firewood, or down by the river standing very still and mapping out landscaping we will not do for four years, or in the cave restarting the heater for the fifteenth time that day.

So then I call his phone, which works or doesn’t depending on whether our carrier has decided to participate in French rural life that afternoon.

I’ve heard that men develop selective hearing after enough years of marriage, having learned that their name, called in an increasingly shrill register, is almost always attached to a task they forgot or a task about to be assigned. I’ve considered this theory carefully, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think the man genuinely cannot hear me, which is somehow worse, because it means there’s nothing to be annoyed about, except for how much land we now have.

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of this: the château, the countryside, and what it’s like to live in France as an American.

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Drawback three, which turned out to be the best thing we’ve bought

So, to help with our acreage ‘problem,’ we bought walkie talkies, and they have many uses.

Sometimes they’re for calling the kids in for dinner. “Hey kids, à table. Over.” A small voice coming back through the static: “Roger that. We’re coming.” Efficient.

They’re also for when the kids want to go check on the chickens or gather eggs by themselves, and we would like to let them, and we would also like to hear a small voice confirm every few minutes that everything is fine at the coop. We are still, I think, recovering slightly from all those years in a neighborhood where you kept your children within arm’s reach. That reflex has not fully left us (it may never).

They’re also for the forest. We’ll be out walking as a family and the kids will want to take a different path, one that branches off from ours, and instead of saying no, we hand over a walkie-talkie. Off they go down their own trail, and we stay in contact.

And they’re for the coach house. A couple of months ago when Sean and I were preparing the coach house, many days we were over there working from morning to evening, and the kids would rather be back at the château playing, so they go, and the walkie talkie comes with them.

In Los Angeles, the answer to “can I go outside?” was almost always no, and it wasn’t because I’m strict. It was because of where we lived.

Here, not only is it eons safer, but the walkie talkies allow us to spread out across our grounds, take up space, and still communicate freely and without screaming myself hoarse across a field.

Drawback four: heat, and quite a lot of it

There is so much more of this house to heat, and heating it is not optional, because winters here are serious. Our heater has been temperamental since the day we moved in and we go through fuel at a rate that feels downright shameful. Worse, the knobs on the radiators are all broken, which means we cannot shut off the rooms we aren’t using (which is most of them). When the heat is on, it is on for the entire château, every unoccupied room warmly and expensively toasty, the system working itself half to death to keep a guest room comfortable for exactly nobody. A modern heating system sits very near the top of our priority list.

Why we chose a ‘little’ castle

Somewhere along the way, back when we were still in Los Angeles, I read that families in smaller homes tend to be closer, for the unglamorous reason that they grow up physically nearer to each other. At the time I found this enormously comforting. Nobody was closer than us! We were practically one organism with four heads.

That line came back to me constantly while we were looking at properties here, because you can get a lot out here for what would buy you very little in the States, and we saw it. We toured châteaux with more than forty rooms, manor houses with several outbuildings, all of them waiting for someone with loads of money and a decade. And in the moment, standing in the fourth reception room of a building you could actually own, something happens to your brain. All of this. Mine. My own. My precious…

And then I would think about the four of us in 500 square feet, and how much I did not want to lose that closeness, and how strange it would be to buy a 20-room house - a house where we could go a whole afternoon without crossing paths.

So we bought the smallest château we saw. The smallness is a big part of why we fell for it. It’s a little crooked, quite quirky, extremely cozy, and just right, which makes it a genuinely Goldilocks castle. Less Malfoy Manor, more the Weasley Burrow with two little turrets.

There’s still plenty of room for the dreams: our own bedrooms eventually, maybe an office, a music studio, a room for exercise. It is almost too much, but not quite.

For now, though, we’re all still on the first floor. The children don’t have a playroom. They don’t even have their own rooms yet! (which will come, and which will require some renovation and money and patience). But we like keeping the living small. We’re not grand people. It turns out you can live an ungrand life inside a fairly grand building, and nobody stops you.

So, the house solved for closeness, which is what we actually wanted. And the walkie talkies solved for the land. The kids are somewhere out in it right now, which was the dream all along.

It’s a wildly different life. In most of the ways that matter for our family, it’s lovelier than anything we had access to before. And in some very specific ways, it’s harder, and more expensive, and involves considerably more shouting out of windows.

Anyway, it’s nearly 6pm, which means it’s nearly dinner, which means I need to locate one husband and two children across 11 acres.

The children have a walkie-talkie. The husband is unaccounted for.

À bientôt,
Kamille

If this is your first time here: Once Upon a Castle is our family’s real-time record of moving to rural France and restoring a small château. The neighbors, the bluebell forest, the chickens, the renovation, and everything this country keeps teaching us that we didn’t know we needed to learn. Two free essays a month, always.

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New here? I’m Kamille. We left California, moved to rural France, and bought a small château in the countryside. This is Castle Diaries, where I write down all the renovation details, stories, and how often it actually goes wrong.

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This post is about a pool that does not yet exist.

We started planning the pool in January, just weeks after buying the château, which tells you something about our priorities and possibly about us as people.

The first pool company came out, walked the property, listened carefully while we explained where we wanted it and how big, and then sent a proposal for a pool in a completely different place, in a different size. Not in any way adjacent to what we’d discussed. So we wrote back with a few small corrections and asked whether we might meet again.

Alas, we never heard from him. Not that week, not any week. Not ever.

Moving on!

So we asked around and found another pool company. We met, talked, brainstormed, and eventually their proposal arrived, and we signed the paperwork that bound all of us together on this project, like a marriage. And like most marriages, the real work began after the union.

We told the pool guy (we’ll call him François) exactly what our goal was, which was for our children to be swimming by the summer. We painted the whole picture, and also told him we were prepping the coach house as a summer rental and it would be wonderful to have the pool ready for guests. He said no problem! He would have it done by July.

Then a legitimate schedule arrived, with the work broken out week by week, every phase laid out in order, ending on a completion date of July 21st. We were over the moon to have an actual schedule like this, which felt like an anomaly among the typical French workflow we had experienced so far.

The first work week came and the team showed up on time, with bells on, and demolished the old unusable pool with tremendous efficiency and speed. It was gone within a few days, and we stood there watching, thinking, “Well, look at this. Look at us. We’ve finally got it all figured out.”

The funny thing is, back in May, the project had already been pushed once, because at that time there was too much rain. François told us that the ground was too wet, and that we needed sunshine.

So we waited for sunshine. And when it finally arrived, it never left.

Be careful what you wish for.

It’s hard to convey how hot it got here without the numbers, so I will give you the numbers. France recorded its hottest day in history on June 23rd, clocking in at 44.3°C (111.7°F) in Pissos, which is in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Paris hit 40.9°C (105.6 °F). Over 1,000 people died from the heat in this country before June was even over. 845 schools closed. By the time the fifth heatwave of the summer rolled through in mid-August, France had never had a year with five.

We chose northern France in part because we assumed we’d be spared (everybody knows the south is the furnace). We picked the green half, the rainy half, the half with mist, but no region was spared from the heat this year. Ours was just slightly less murderous than the south.

The wildfires were the worst part and thankfully they didn’t reach us. 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) burned in France this summer, more than anything in living memory, and Spain had the largest fire in its recorded history. We were lucky enough that the fires never got close enough for us to even smell the smoke, but I still checked the news every morning like it was a weather report, because that’s pretty much what it had become.

And the heat wasn’t even a wave, really. A wave implies it goes in, and then out again. This came in several weeks long, broke for two or three days, and came back before anything had cooled down. The nights stayed hot, which means you couldn’t open the house up in the evenings. If you opened the windows at 10pm, all you would get was more hot air.

We were told we would be well-protected from the heat inside the stone walls of the château and coach house. And while this held true in the spring, summer told a different story of these old stone homes.

They’re famously impenetrable in the heat. They stand there cool and smug while the new builds down the road cook, and there’s a real, age-old reason for it, which is that the walls are two feet thick and it takes a very long time for heat to get through them. The stones hold in the cold the way a cellar does. Everyone tells you this when you buy one, and for about four days, it’s true.

But it only works to a point. If it’s suddenly 100°F on Monday, you’re fine inside. Tuesday, still fine. By Friday, after five straight days over 100, the stone has been absorbing heat the entire week with nowhere to release it at night. So on Saturday, when the temperature “drops” to 90, the house is significantly hotter than it was on Monday at 100. The walls have become a battery. Everything you loved about the building is now working against you, slowly, at its own pace, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it back the other way.

What was once your savior becomes your enemy.

We had a few truly ugly portable AC units, which saved us, and we adjusted our whole lives to the mornings. Anything outdoors had to be done before 11am, and afternoons and evenings we got very inventive indoors.

So we made the most of it, but this wasn’t the case for everyone. Overall, France caved.

This is a country that has spent decades declining air conditioning on principle, citing the thick walls, the shutters, the seasons, a certain national toughness about discomfort, and general suspicion of AC units making you sick. AC was just for Americans who couldn’t cope (that’s me!). And then this summer the units sold out nationwide, the mid-range ones disappearing from Bricomarche and E.Leclerc and Leroy Merlin within about 48 hours of every heat spike, and installation waits went from three weeks to ten. Yes, the French bought air conditioners, in enormous numbers. Not smugly or ironically or even shamefully, but because it had actually become dangerous.

I didn’t feel vindicated about it. Instead, I felt awful. There’s no satisfaction in watching a country give up a thing it was sort of right about, because the conditions it was right about stopped existing.

Everything went dusty - that’s the texture I’ll remember. Dry and crunchy underfoot everywhere you walked, the grass gone to straw, the gardens absolutely roasted. Every department in mainland France ended up under some kind of water restriction. I found myself actively longing for mist, and dew, and wet leaves and that specific smell, and gutters running, and having to find somebody’s boots. I never thought I would actually miss the mud - the infamous mud I’m always complaining about in my posts.

But the mud didn’t come, because the rain didn’t come.

And still, somewhere underneath all of this, on a spreadsheet on my computer, was a pool completion date of July 21st.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers, because it’s the details I don’t reveal to the whole internet: what the delay actually was in the end, the guests who checked out of the coach house halfway through their stay and asked for their money back, the promises I made to my 7-year-old and to my nieces that I then could not keep, and where the pool actually stands as of this week.

Castle Diaries is the transparent version of the renovation. Twice a month, plus two additional posts about life in France as an American.

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Before I owned a castle, I did what any reasonable person does with a dream they’re fairly sure will never come true: I watched other people live it on television.

Specifically, I watched Downton Abbey. I watched Lady Mary ring a small bell to summon Anna, who would appear to dress her and do her hair. I watched Cora eat a flawless breakfast in bed, carried up on a tray by O’Brien, prepared downstairs by Mrs. Patmore, consumed while propped against pillows in a silk nightgown and matching robe, catching up on the day’s events before her feet had so much as touched the floor. I studied this closely, dreaming of such a life.

I’m here to tell you, it is not like that here at our château.

There is no Carson bringing the tea. No Tom to drive us into town. No Daisy to stoke the fires at dawn. It’s just the four of us: me, my husband Sean, and our two small children, rattling around a castle built more than three hundred years ago, along with the forest, the river, and the various woodland animals who were here long before us.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in a small château in rural France, restoring it one leak and one bluebell at a time. Castle Diaries is normally where paid subscribers go behind the scenes, but I’m opening this one up to everyone. Pull up a chair.

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The short version, for context: we left California a few years ago, rented a farmhouse in the French countryside while we figured out whether we actually liked it here (we did), and then, with careful planning and stubborn optimism, we bought a small French château. It has two pepperpot towers, a chapel hiding in the woods, a gatehouse that once housed the guardien, and a path that loops the whole property where the moat used to run (back when this place was a fortress and was poised for battles). One of the towers holds our spiral staircase. All of it, every stone and every leak, is now ours to bring back to life.

I do have turrets. What I do not do is throw a long golden braid out the window of said turrets so an evil witch can climb up it (although, now that I’ve spent some real time in an old castle, I’ve started to see that story differently. I strongly suspect Rapunzel’s tower stairs were simply broken (as tower stairs often are), or there was a mysterious leak nobody could get a contractor to come look at, and the hair was a temporary workaround that got badly out of hand. I understand her now. I, too, would rig up something deranged before I’d sit around waiting for the man to call back).

We do not spend our days being laced into gowns and gloves and jewels. Nobody does my hair (sadly). We don’t host neighboring aristocrats for tea, or dress for a staged hunt, or get bored on a Tuesday and ask the stable boy to ready the horses so we might frolic across the grounds. We do not have a night nurse who delivers the children, freshly bathed, for one kiss on the cheek after tea and then spirits them away again.

We do all of it ourselves. Which means that we are, as far as I can tell, every single character in Downton Abbey at the same time. We are the family, and we are the full staff. I am Cora (though in outlook and general spiciness, closer to the Dowager Countess) and also Daisy and Mrs. Hughes and Anna (I do dress my daughter and do her hair) and O’Brien and the nanny, and the list keeps going. Sean is Tom and Lord Grantham and Carson (and, let’s be honest, Mrs. Patmore, because he does all the cooking. Bless him).

Somehow we manage, and somehow we even love it, though I won’t pretend it isn’t a staggering amount of work.

Here is what a typical summer day actually looks like.

7:00 a.m.
Our rooster, Mr. Darcy, delivers his opening remarks. It is a hearty, full-throated cock-a-doodle-doo, and it is our alarm whether we like it or not. We get up and put on our finest château-wear. For Sean this is shorts and a t-shirt with a few holes and some stains, one he has formally designated as already ruined so he can stop grieving it while he works. For me it’s whatever’s clean, and a low ponytail I scrape together so fast I come out looking like a minor founding father (there is no one here to impress but the rooster) and no makeup, because there’s no time, and no point (again, the rooster). Then I dress our daughter and do her hair, which is to say I give her the same fast ponytail (Anna would be appalled).

7:15 a.m.
Sean heads out to the chickens (sometimes with the kids) to feed them and collect the morning’s eggs. The kids thunder down to the cave (the cellar, but “cave” is the French term and makes us all feel more medieval) to feed our two new kittens and clean the litter box (a chore they have very maturely taken up). Sean makes the kids breakfast: usually homemade yogurt he somehow produces from fresh organic milk from our neighbor with fruit, or eggs and veggies with toast (you cannot skip the toast here, it’s just too good), sometimes a fruit and veggie smoothie. I slip away to do computer work while I still have both hands.

8:30 a.m.
Comms. Oh the comms! The genteel château pastime of telephoning French people who do not answer. We call the roofer, for roughly the tenth time, about installing the septic ventilation, so that our front lawn will stop smelling like, well, our stuff. We call the plumber (for the umpteenth time) about the heater, which has been faulty since the day we moved in. We call around for a team to help with the next renovation phase, possibly the gatehouse. None of it is fairytale-esque. Just, what needs to be done for the castle.

9:15 a.m.
The pool crew arrives with a small team to fill in some of the trenches they’ve dug and open a new one to carry the rainwater over by the coach house. Sean makes them coffee and chats with them while helping with and overseeing the work. I take the kids: reading, art, an activity book, the occasional hostage negotiation.

10:00 a.m.
We all go outside! Probably the best part of the day. We water the orchard, Sean mows, we water the flowers in the coach house courtyard, and Sean burns off the weeds that keep pushing up through the gravel (relentless intruders). The kids harvest whatever the vegetable garden is offering that day and do lots of running around. Sean and I plant a new camellia, plus kiwis and blueberries and raspberries, and then we get down on our knees and rebuild the stone path in the kitchen garden (which was all but demolished when the septic was installed a couple of months ago).

12:00 p.m.
Sean makes lunch and we carry it outside. Usually chicken sandwiches, some cut up veggies, apples, and, on a good day, passion fruit kombucha (one of our favorite summer staples). We linger after we’ve finished, and the kids run around while we talk.

1:30 p.m.
I head to the coach house to do the unphotographable work: laundry, organizing and folding linens, setting ant traps (the ants have been relentless during this crazy heatwave), cleaning, and then clipping fresh hydrangeas for the vases, because we have guests arriving in a few days (and I’d like them to notice the hydrangeas and not the ant traps).

3:00 p.m.
Everyone comes inside and collapses. Short naps, or a quiet activity like reading, coloring, watching a YouTube video on the best way to remove centuries-old paint, or staring meaningfully at a ceiling beam (usually what I opt for).

4:00 p.m.
I write. This, in fact, is the slot where my Substack essays get written. Sean goes back outside for more maintenance and loads the van for a run to the déchèterie (the dump/tip) or to the donation drop, because this place came with a heroic amount of stuff to sort through (some of it treasure and a great deal of it not). The kids either help him or stage something elaborate indoors.

6:30 p.m.
Sean cooks dinner and the kids sometimes help, and I steal one more hour of computer work (currently: making the information signs for the coach house rental, a job I did not expect to swallow me whole). We eat at our old French dining table. Sometimes a salad with grilled chicken and ripe peaches, sometimes salmon with rice, and in summer, often, Sean’s homemade ice cream, vanilla or passion fruit or raspberry, depending on his mood and the available fruit. Delish.

8:00 p.m.
Cleanup, pajamas, teeth. The civilized machinery of the evening.

8:30 p.m.
More often than not, it is simply too beautiful outside to go to bed, so we head back out into the long summer light and run around a while longer. The light won’t last, and neither will they being this small. Le sigh.

9:00 p.m. (well… more like 10, in the summer months)
We take our time. A lot of reading, a lot of drawing, all four of us together in the bedroom. I usually fall asleep to an audiobook, always fiction. I have enough non-fiction in my real life.

So, no bell rang. Nobody came to turn down the beds or clear away the tray, partly because there was no tray, and partly because the only staff on the premises were already asleep with a chapter still playing. We’ll be up with Mr. Darcy in the morning. That’s the arrangement.

À bientôt,
Kamille

Castle Diaries is normally for paid subscribers. This one’s on the house. If you’d like the rest of it (the renovation decisions, what things actually cost, the parts I can’t always publish for everyone) plus two more Life in France essays a month, you can join us below. Free subscribers get the next chapter in their inbox either way.

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I kept not letting myself type that sentence, the way you don’t say a baby’s name out loud until it’s really coming. But it’s (finally!) done. The beds are made, the books are on the shelves, and a couple of weeks ago we hosted our very first group of guests, who arrived as strangers and left having found the good knives and the one light switch that makes no sense. Nobody asked for their money back, which in this line of work I have decided counts as a standing ovation.

Needless to say, it went well. Better than we let ourselves hope, which felt like a small miracle given how we got here.

Because, well, we did the entire thing during the worst heatwave France has ever recorded. Ever.

I’m not being dramatic here. June 2026 was the hottest June ever measured in this country. Météo-France put most of the map under red alert, dozens of départements at once, the highest warning level they have. Towns all over the place blew past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), and one afternoon Rennes hit 43, which is nearly 110. Forecasters kept comparing it to the deadly 2003 heatwave, the one older French people still talk about the way Californians talk about specific earthquakes. That was the weather we chose to carry four bedrooms’ worth of furniture through.

We are American, so of course we had already decided the coach house would have some air conditioning. This is not negotiable for us. It is possibly the most American thing about us, more than the peanut butter, more than the constant apologizing or oversharing. And for once our Americanness saved us (o say can you seeeee!) because we had ordered the AC units early, back before the heat actually arrived, purely out of habit.

Then, about halfway through, one of our units broke, and we realized we needed one more.

So Sean went to buy another one. Sold out. He tried the next store. Sold out. Every store within a hundred-mile radius, sold out (the way toilet paper was sold out in a very specific spring we all remember). Apparently the entire country had come to the same conclusion at the same moment, which is how I learned that the French have, at long last, converted to air conditioning. Centuries of insisting they didn’t need it, and then one June they all cracked at once.

Then I called one last store. A hardware store a few towns over. It rang once and went to a recorded message.

I laughed when I heard it. Then I cried a little.

This one’s for paid subscribers. On the other side: what that voicemail actually said, the full before-and-after tour of all four bedrooms, the kitchen, the courtyard and the game room, the piano that arrived at 104 degrees, and the injury my husband still won’t discuss. Paid subscribers also get the coach house direct booking link before anyone else. Upgrade and come see what we did.

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If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and currently learning that nothing here happens on the timeline you imagined. Paid subscribers follow the renovation in real time in Castle Diaries, which is where this one lives.

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About a week ago, Sean and I stood in the middle of the coach house, surrounded by half-built furniture and cleaning supplies and a green carpet I have personally declared a war crime, and looked at each other, and I said:

What have we been doing this whole time?

We have lived at this château for six months. Six months. And we are only now, in a sweating panic, trying to get the coach house ready to rent in July. If we had started the day we arrived, we would be finished. We would be sitting in lawn chairs. We would be relaxed people.

Instead, we are people surrounded by Allen wrenches, cardboard boxes, and years of accumulated dust and grime.

Here is how we got here.

The plan that wasn’t the plan

When we bought the château, we knew we wanted to renovate the coach house eventually. We did not know in what order any of this would happen, because nobody hands you an order of operations when you buy a 17th-century building. You just start, and the building tells you what it wants, usually at the worst possible moment.

Early on, we decided the coach house should come first. A full renovation, done properly, to turn it into a place we could rent and actually support this life. Smart. Responsible. The kind of decision that makes you feel like an adult.

Then we met with the contractors and architects, and they explained, kindly, that the renovation could not begin until roughly seven months after we signed. Seven months of permitting and scheduling artisans before anyone so much as picks up a hammer. Which meant the real work might start this winter. Maybe early next year.

So we had a choice. Let the coach house sit empty and beautiful and earning nothing through an entire summer and fall. Or spruce it up enough to rent it now, before the real renovation, and make some income while we wait.

The coach house, it turns out, is in great shape. It needs updating (see: the carpet, my nemesis), and it has not been properly cleaned in years, so we have done deep cleans that I will not describe in detail out of respect for you. But the bones are good. It’s genuinely rentable.

So we decided: we rent it this summer, as-is-but-prettier, and renovate it properly after.

Which sounds simple. It was not simple, because of a decision we made on purpose, knowing it would make our lives harder.

We could have just thrown it all together

The easy version of this is obvious. Jump on Amazon. Fill a cart at IKEA. Furnish the whole place in a weekend with cheap things that look fine in photos, rent it for a season, then throw it all out when the real renovation starts.

We couldn’t do it.

Partly because it felt like a waste of money, buying a houseful of furniture we’d discard in a matter of months, then buying all new things after. But mostly because it felt like a waste of things. Furnishing a place solely with cheap, mass-produced things and then sending all of it to a landfill (or a charity shop, where it becomes someone else’s eventual landfill) is exactly the kind of disposable churn we moved here partly to get away from.

So we made the harder choice. We’re furnishing the coach house with pieces we actually love. The forever pieces. The ones that will stay through the renovation and beyond, because we chose them to last.

This is, to be clear, the slow and more expensive and time-eating choice. It is the reason we are in a mad dash instead of a leisurely stroll.

Here is where I take you inside the coach house, and show you what we’ve actually been building (and the piano we did not plan to buy, and the pool that nearly didn’t happen at all).

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Follow our journey

I’m writing this from a house whose septic system is currently being installed. The digger is outside. The trenches are open. There is mud where there used to be lawn. And somewhere beneath all of it, a team of French workers is trying to solve a puzzle that began long before we got here and is, frankly, weirder than anyone warned us.

If you read the last Castle Diaries, you know we were planning to leave the château’s septic alone. The wink-wink advice, the friend who said just wait until it breaks, the comforting French tradition of pretending the rule doesn’t exist until it inconveniently does. That was the plan.

The septic had other plans. Let me walk you through how we got here.

Sign One: The Bubbling

One day, someone (#someone) flushed a toilet on the second floor. Almost immediately, the toilet two floors below it began to bubble.

If you have never been in a house when a toilet started bubbling without provocation, I want to assure you that it is not a sound that fades from memory. It is the sound of something that should be moving in one direction moving instead in another. It is, in plumbing terms, the sound of an emergency politely clearing its throat.

That can’t be good, Sean and I said to each other, in the tone of two people who already knew it wasn’t good.

What it meant, we learned, was that the septic tank was full. Full enough that anything we sent into it had nowhere to go and was, instead, looking for alternate exits. The polite term is needs pumping. The accurate term is whatever you do, do not host a dinner party this week.

We called someone. We left a voicemail. We waited. They were, presumably, on vacation, as everyone in France is at all times. We held our breath (in more ways than one).

Sign Two: The Ceiling

A week or so later, my mom flew in from California, and my sister and brother-in-law (who live in the east of France) drove over with their new baby. We were all settled in the living room on the ground floor (the fire going, a glass of wine, the kids underfoot, the baby asleep, the works) while my sister was upstairs taking a shower.

And then, the ceiling started raining.

I want to be clear about what I mean by raining. I do not mean a weak drip. I do not mean a faint trickle. I mean a tropical-storm-style downpour, directly onto the sofa, of an amount of water that suggested the entire upstairs shower had decided to relocate. Sean and the kids grabbed every vessel in reach (bowls, large copper pots, a cast iron skillet, a waste bin) while I sprinted up two flights of stairs screaming my sister’s name with what I now realize was the full energy of a horror movie protagonist, while her infant was sitting downstairs, which I had failed to consider in the moment. (Sorry, baby. Sorry, sister.)

I found her mid-shampoo. She was alarmed. I told her to turn off the water. I escorted her, in a towel, down to my shower so she could finish. We called a septic pumping company.

This brings us to the truly French part.

The Tank That Nobody Could Find

The pumping team arrived, equipped and ready. They asked where the septic tank was.

We did not know.

This was, I will admit, a bit embarrassing, and a piece of information we had assumed someone would have given us at some point. We searched the papers from our purchase. Nothing about a tank location. We called our realtor, who confirmed cheerfully, with no real concern: Oh yes, the former owners didn’t know either. That’s part of why it’s non-conforme. It’s basically unknown.

I asked her where she thought it went, then. Where everything had been going. For years.

She said, equally cheerfully: It probably just runs straight into the river.

The river is beautiful. The river is the reason I have spent the last six months imagining the kids swimming in it, the kayaks the previous owners left behind getting actual use, picnics on the bank. The river was not, in that vision, also our septic output.

The septic, suddenly, became priority #1.

The Plan, and Why the Plan Did Not Survive

Replacing a septic system in France is not a project you just start. There is a process. You commission an étude de filière, a formal engineering study that determines what kind of system your property can support and where it should go. The study gets approved by SPANC, the local public office that regulates non-collective sanitation. (Yes, there is a French government body whose entire job is overseeing septic systems. Yes, this is incredibly French. Yes, I have learned to love them.)

Our study said: gravity-fed system, install behind the château, discharge toward the river side of the property. No pump needed. Relatively straightforward.

We got the approval. We hired the team, led by a man named Jérôme and the expert digger, Pascale. Excavation began.

The first thing they found was the old tank. Small and very old, and completely full. It had been sitting beneath our lawn for who knows how long, holding who knows how much, communicating with no one. The team removed it with the efficiency of people who have removed several of these in their careers. The mystery of where it had been was finally solved.

Then the real trouble started.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. You’ll get: why the engineering study turned out to be wrong, the €3,500 decision we paused the entire project to think through, the discovery that our upstairs shower and sink were not connected to the septic system but to the rainwater drainage (yes, really), the ancient brick-and-flint stone trench the team found running toward the river that nobody can fully explain, and where things stand right now — still mid-installation, still mid-mystery.

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When we bought the château, we were told, politely, officially, on paper, that the septic system was non-conforme. That meant we had one year from moving in to replace it.

We were also told, off the record, with a small smile and a bit of a shrug, that “no one will really come check.” Wink wink. France is full of these moments. The official rule is one thing. The unofficial understanding is another. The two coexist peacefully, the way two cats coexist when neither wants to acknowledge the other is in the room.

A friend of ours, a fellow château owner, came over for lunch shortly after we moved in. We mentioned the septic situation. She tilted her head and said, “Does it work?“

Yes, we said. It works.

“Then why replace it?” she said. “Wait until it breaks.”

This is excellent advice, financially speaking. It is also the advice that everyone in our part of France has apparently been giving each other for several decades, which is how you end up with a region full of buildings whose septic systems are roughly the same age as the buildings themselves, all very much non-conforme, all working fine for now, all being sold from one owner to the next with the same small smile and the same shrug.

We were on board with this plan. We were going to wait until it broke. We were going to be sensible.

Then it began acting up. Loudly. Persistently. In ways that turned out to be much weirder than we’d been warned.

That part of the story deserves its own post, and it will get one. But dealing with it forced us to confront something we’d been somewhat ignoring: the coach house has its own septic system. A separate one. Also non-conforme. And unlike the château, the coach house has a deadline that cannot be ‘shrugged’ at.

The Deadline

We are opening the coach house for short-term rentals this summer. This is the first piece of the property to come online as a working gîte, and the timeline is real and tight. Everything that has to happen before guests can sleep here has to happen very soon, and the first thing on that list, the thing nothing else can move forward without, is a septic system.

The coach house has been sitting here for a few centuries without one. Or so we assumed.

When the team arrived to install the new system, the first question they asked was: where is the existing one?

We did not know. The previous owners had not known. The papers from the sale did not say. (Are we sensing a pattern?) They started digging in the general area we all agreed seemed most likely, and eventually unearthed it: a very old, very small tank that someone had installed at some point and then, as far as we could tell, never mentioned to anyone again.

Then they started the actual installation. And that is where the trouble started.

The Walnut Tree Situation

Before the digger could begin its real work, there was a problem in the way. The problem was a walnut tree.

It was not a thriving walnut tree. It had been planted at some point in a spot with too much shade, by someone who either didn’t know or didn’t care that walnut trees prefer sun. It had grown sideways trying to find some, leaning at an angle that made you tilt your head when you looked at it, the way a dog tilts its head when it hears the word ‘treat.’ And it was sitting exactly where the pipes needed to go.

I had assumed this meant the tree was going to die. Sometimes things have to die for septic systems. This is the order of the world.

But the man operating the digger looked at the tree, then looked at us, and offered, quite casually, to replant it. Apparently this is the order of France. We walked the property together looking for a better spot, and he pointed to a place I would never have chosen on my own, in the orchard area, full sun, plenty of room, no other trees competing for the same light. Then he dug it up, carried it over, planted it, staked it with reinforcements to hold it straight, and patted the soil down with the care of someone whose grandmother was watching.

The tree is now standing upright. In the sun. Vertical for perhaps the first time in its life. It is much happier now (and so am I).

I have lived in places where if a tree was in the way of a pipe, the tree’s last day was today. The tree’s last day, here, became the first day of a much better life.

The Permission Cascade

The next problem was the road.

Our property is up a small road, and across that road is one neighbor’s house. To get the septic line where it needed to go, the pipes had to run under the road. The road, it turns out, does not belong to the commune. It belongs to a woman who lives up the hill, and she had to sign a document giving us permission to dig under her road.

We asked. She signed. Everyone was very pleasant about it.

We thought we were done.

Then we found out that the specific five centimeters of the road we needed to dig under did not belong to her. It belonged to the neighbor across the way, because at some point a property line had been drawn that put approximately the width of a smartphone of road into his lot. So we needed his permission too. For five centimeters.

He also signed. He was also very pleasant. France is full of moments like this, where something that would be a nightmare in the States becomes a small piece of paperwork and a friendly exchange, and you walk away thinking that was much easier than it had any right to be, and also I cannot believe we just got permission to dig under five centimeters of someone’s gravel.

Pas Esthétique

Then came the vent.

Septic systems need to vent. I now know this. I did not know this last month. The vent is a pipe that goes up, releasing whatever needs to be released into the sky, and the question becomes: where on the building does the pipe go?

The team wanted to run it straight up the main wall of the coach house. A tall, fat, very visible and very ugly pipe, climbing the side of a beautiful stone building like ivy if ivy had no aesthetic interests whatsoever.

I said no. Specifically, I said "pas esthétique," which translates roughly to "over my dead body, but politely."

This kicked off an hour of standing around pointing at different walls. Every alternative had a problem. That one’s not high enough. That one’s too close to the window. That one is the wrong side of the building. I started to feel like the unreasonable one, which I was, by the standards of septic installation. By the standards of a 17th-century coach house, I was exactly correct.

We finally found it: a spot tucked next to an existing pipe on the side of the old fournil, the little bread-oven house that sits behind the coach house. Out of sight from anywhere a guest would look. Aesthetically (mostly) invisible. Functionally fine.

The team said yes, this would work, but it required a roofer to come in and route the pipe under the roof tiles before placing the vent. We did not have a roofer available. We had not been able to get a roofer on the phone for months.

I assumed this meant we were back to the giant wall pipe.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. You'll get: the small miracle that happened that afternoon, the trench-of-opportunity moment where I had a surprisingly useful idea, Sean's contribution (which is very Sean), and the before-and-after photos of what our beautiful green courtyard looks like now that it is a mud field. Plus a preview of what's coming next, including the much bigger septic story unfolding at the château itself.

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We were going to bake things. Learn new songs. Do projects. Have picnics every day. Go to a film, visit a restaurant, build something with our hands. The list was long and optimistic, like all school holiday lists are - drafted by people who have temporarily forgotten that life takes longer than expected and that two small children have their own opinions about how time should be spent.

We did about half of it. We’re not sad about this. Our son had a birthday this month, and if you’ve ever tried to plan a themed birthday party for kids while also living in rural France with a septic installation happening in your garden, you’ll understand where the picnic time went.

He wanted a science-themed party.

This is not as straightforward as it sounds. The party decoration universe - online shops, party supply websites, the entire industry of themed birthday infrastructure - operates on a fairly fixed menu of acceptable children’s interests. Dinosaurs. Unicorns. Princesses. Woodland creatures. Space. There are approximately forty-seven variations of space available at any given moment, in every color combination, at every price point, shipped to your door in three days.

Science is not on the menu.

Which is why we tried. “Hey, how about a space party? Rockets! Stars! The universe! It’s basically science!”

“No,” he said. “Science. Which can include space,” he added generously, “but is not just space.”

Drat! Almost had him.

The crown situation.

I had bought him a birthday crown from Etsy years ago - adjustable, beautiful, and something we kept because we (I) loved it and because I was certain it would still fit. He wore it every birthday. I loved that crown possibly more than he did.

This year he looked at it and something had shifted. He was older now. More mature, and refined. And apparently that comes with stronger opinions. He wanted a science crown instead.

I want to be clear that a science crown is not something that exists on Amazon.fr. I looked. It does not exist anywhere within reasonable shipping distance of rural France on less than two week’s notice.

So I made him one.

I found our most science-adjacent wrapping paper - constellations and planets, which is space-themed rather than strictly science-themed, but we were working with what we had. I cut seven A4-sized sheets with scissors, did some origami folding magic, glued it with one of the kids’ school gluesticks, and held my breath.

It was actually quite good. He wore it for the entire party (voluntarily).

I’m choosing to count this as one of my finer achievements. (Watch me make it here - it took about fifteen minutes and was relatively easy on the crafting scale.)

The septic situation.

One week before the party, we received a phone call from the septic company.

Not a “when would work for you?” phone call. A “we are coming Tuesday” phone call. Two days before the party. We had been trying to schedule this for months - the coach house septic had to be installed in the kitchen garden area, which meant we couldn’t start any garden work until it was done, which meant the whole spring planting timeline was sitting behind it like a very patient queue. We couldn’t say no.

They came. They dug. A large excavator appeared in what was supposed to be our kitchen garden. Trenches opened up across the grounds. A substantial septic tank materialized in the landscape.

We thought briefly about a septic-themed party. We could give the children test tubes and hard hats and have them analyze the bacteria in our drainage. Very science-adjacent. Very on theme.

We decided against this.

The excavation was finished two days before the party and it looked, I want to be honest here, quite ‘industrial.’ Dirt everywhere. Large tubes. A construction zone aesthetic that was not exactly what we had envisioned for a child’s birthday party at a French château.

We told ourselves the children would be looking up at the beautiful property rather than down at the torn earth. This turned out to be correct, mostly because we gave them a treasure map and sent them into the forest.

If you’re new here, I’m an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband Sean and our two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I document the renovation, the life, and everything France keeps teaching us. Paid subscribers get Castle Diaries, where I write the real version in real time. Come stay a while.

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The party.

Sean, who is absolutely science-minded in a way I am not, was enthusiastic about the theme from the start. His vision: a treasure hunt, molecular structure building, a volcanic eruption, lab coats, safety glasses. All of it. For six-year-olds.

We procrastinated, as one does, and assembled the actual plan the night before.

Here is what we made:

A list of objects to find, with each child’s name written on the back in invisible ink. We provided black light pens. The children had to find their own name before the map was revealed - which meant they each held their paper up to the light with the focused intensity of tiny detectives, which was probably one of the best moments of the whole day.

The map itself was something else. Sean took an overhead photograph of the property, turned it into a hand-drawn illustration, and then we brought it into Canva to mark the locations of the hidden objects. Then - and this is where we became ‘those parents’ - we printed it, soaked it in tea water until the paper darkened and crinkled, glued beautiful wrapping paper to the back, and Sean burned the edges with a lighter.

It looked like something you’d find in an old chest in a château attic. Which, given where we live, felt appropriate.

The objects the children were hunting: small handmade atoms - oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sodium - which our own kids had spent the previous day coloring and decorating. They were scattered around the property. The kids also needed to find molecular structure diagrams and connecting sticks, which would allow them to actually build the molecular models of vinegar (well, the acetic acid in vinegar 🤓) and baking soda once everything was assembled.

The hunt went well, mostly.

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There’s something nobody tells you about buying a château in rural France: wait until spring. Just wait.

We had a winter that taught us things. How to heat a room that doesn’t want to be heated. How to make decisions in a language you’re still assembling in real time. How to look at a problem you’ve never seen before and just...begin. It was gray and cold and occasionally overwhelming, and we went through it anyway - figuring things out, getting things wrong, figuring them out again. At certain points in February, still standing felt like a genuine achievement worth acknowledging.

And then…spring arrived, and the château said: watch this.

Here’s what’s been happening inside the walls, out in the field, and deep in the forest that we apparently own but are only now beginning to understand.

The magnolia.

There is a tree right outside our bedroom window that we have been watching since we first viewed the château last fall. Completely dormant then, and stubbornly so for what felt like an unreasonable stretch of time afterward. Sean was convinced from the beginning that it was a magnolia. I, a person who has eyes and could plainly see that it was doing absolutely nothing, was considerably less convinced.

Then in March, every other magnolia within a five mile radius bloomed in full spectacular glory, and ours continued to stand there looking like a considered arrangement of sticks. I started mentally redecorating around a different tree entirely. Something unpretentious. An oak, maybe. Something that wasn’t going to humiliate me with its refusal to perform.

But then…she bloomed.

Not only did she bloom, but she turned out to be a rare yellow magnolia, which I did not know was a thing, and she is genuinely one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen outside any window in my life. All that time I spent doubting her, mentally replacing her with a ‘sensible’ oak, and she was simply waiting for her moment. Playing the long game. Letting the other magnolias go first while she stood there in smug, bare-branched neudity, knowing exactly what she had. A diva move, honestly. A flawless one. I owe her an apology. I have given her one.

We've since noticed that yellow seems to be the château's signature color. Yellow daffodils, yellow marigolds, yellow dandelions, small yellow shrubs scattered throughout the garden. Someone who lived here long before us clearly loved yellow and planted accordingly, and honestly? Same. We'll layer in more color as time goes on, but nothing is getting ripped out for now. The yellow was here first and it has earned its place.

The bluebells in the forest, the pool, the new additions to our flock, the wisteria, the willow, and everything else we’ve been working on this spring - it’s all below for paid subscribers.

If you’ve been reading along and considering whether to join, consider this the invitation.

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This is what it actually looked like.

Eight minutes of our first Easter here - the real version, not the highlight reel. The château in the morning light, the kids moving through the bluebells, the croquet on the lawn, the costumes in the forest in the late afternoon. All of it, as it happened.

No production value was harmed in the making of this video. What you’re getting is exactly what we lived.

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Sean set his alarm for 5am.

Not to work out. Not for an early flight. To put on his bathrobe and slippers, grab a basket of eggs, and walk around a French château in the dark with his phone flashlight, hiding things in places he would have to remember later. This is what real love looks like, and Hallmark has never once filmed this part.

I was asleep. I remain unashamed.

The kids woke me at six. I was risen!

We made them wait. Not long, but enough for a little patience stretching. Everyone got dressed, faces washed, the full civilized morning routine, because anticipation is part of it and also because Sean needed to finish his dutch pancakes with fresh raspberry sauce (I mean…it is Easter). We had smoothies. We sat at the table like people who live in a house and eat breakfast together and don’t immediately sprint outside at dawn.

Then we let them go.

They started at the château, finding eggs tucked into corners and along windowsills, and then followed a trail further out, up toward the hidden chapel, and then into the bluebell forest.

I want to try to describe what it looked like to watch two small children find brightly colored eggs hidden in a carpet of bluebells, with the morning light coming through the trees, and I keep running out of words. Ethereal is the right one and also feels insufficient. It looked like something that shouldn’t be real. It looked like the kind of thing you’d see in a film and think was too much.

It was not too much. It was exactly enough.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in a small château in rural France, figuring it out one beautiful, occasionally chaotic day at a time. This post is free. If you’d like to follow the whole story - the renovation, the forest, the chickens, and everything else we’re building here - we’d love to have you along.

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I have to tell you what happened the day before, because it’s part of the story.

We were in the car - all four of us - when our six year old said, very casually, “Is the Easter bunny real? Or do you guys hide the eggs?”

Sean and I did the thing. The side-eye. The slight pause. The careful non-answer that buys you approximately thirty seconds while you figure out what the other person thinks you should say. Our five year old was in the back seat, listening to every word with the focused attention of a very small lawyer.

We evaded. We moved on. We thought we’d gotten away with it.

That afternoon, my daughter came and sat next to me on the sofa. She looked me directly in the eyes with an expression I can only describe as a tiny detective who already knows the answer and is giving you one last chance to come clean.

“Mom,” she said. “I want to know the REAL truth. The really REAL truth. Are YOU the ones who hide the eggs?”

I hesitated. Then nodded, slowly. With what I imagine was a very guilty smile.

She didn’t say anything. She got up, found her brother, and immediately told him everything.

Sean and I waited for the fallout. The tears, the betrayal, the collapse of magic. We waited.

Nothing.

So I asked them: “What do you WANT the answer to be?”

One after the other, without hesitation: “I want it to be the Easter Bunny.”

“Okay then,” I said. “Let it be what you want it to be.”

And that was that. The next morning they opened eggs in a bluebell forest saying “I can’t believe the Easter Bunny knew we like organic chocolate!” with complete and total commitment. They know. They absolutely know. And they chose the magic anyway.

I’ve thought about this a lot today - the deliberate decision to keep believing in something even after you’ve seen behind the curtain, because the thing behind the curtain is less interesting than what you had before. I don’t think that’s naivety. I think that might actually be wisdom, and I think my five and six year old have figured out something it takes most adults considerably longer to land on.

After the eggs were opened on the lawn - and we went all out this year, disco eggs and crystal eggs and celestine eggs and shaker eggs that rattle like maracas and dragon eggs and a considerable amount of organic chocolate - we did something that felt very right for this property on this particular day.

We got out the croquet set.

Sean bought it last year at a brocante, which is essentially a French antique market and one of my favorite institutions in this country. The croquet set is approximately 150 years old. It is also not entirely complete and somewhat fragile, which we chose not to think about too hard. Sean mowed the area, we set up a modified version that accommodated the gaps in our set, and we played croquet on the lawn of our French château on Easter Sunday.

It felt exactly like Downton Abbey. I kept waiting for Carson to appear with the afternoon tea. He never came. But I have recently been taught by two small children that you can know something isn't real and choose the better version anyway, so: Carson came. The tea was lovely. “That’ll be all, Carson.” I've decided.

Lunch was sandwiches at the little bistro table outside. Passion fruit kombucha from our local bio shop. Sunshine. The tiredness that comes from a morning spent entirely outdoors doing things that feel genuinely worth doing.

The kids went to collect eggs from the chickens, discovered that brown eggs are significantly harder to dye, and responded by getting out pens and drawing their own designs on them instead. Nothing elaborate. Just two children decorating eggs with markers, which turned out to be exactly the right amount of Easter craft for this particular day.

Then, because the day apparently had more left in it, someone suggested dress up.

Within approximately four minutes we had a fairy and a wizard.

The fairy was committed. The wizard was committed. There was no halfhearted costuming happening, no casual wearing of a hat and calling it done. These were full characters, fully inhabited, and they had places to be.

Specifically: the bluebell forest.

So we went. All four of us, in the late afternoon light, the fairy and the wizard leading the way down the path and into the trees. I walked behind them and watched them move through all that blue and purple, fully in character, narrating things to each other in the private language of children deep in their own world, and I had the specific feeling of knowing you are in a moment you will remember.

A fairy and a wizard in a bluebell forest on Easter Sunday. At our château. In France.

I keep trying to find the right word for what this place hands us sometimes and I keep landing on the same one: unearned. Not in a bad way, but in the way of something you couldn’t have planned or asked for and got anyway. The forest didn’t know it was Easter. It was just being itself. The children didn’t know they were making a memory. They were just playing.

The best things usually arrive that way.

We finished the day with The Secret Garden. The 1993 one. Our favorite Easter movie, despite having absolutely nothing to do with Easter, which has never once bothered us. I have a whole story about that film and this château and how one might have led to the other. But that's for another post.

Here is what I want to say about this Easter specifically:

We didn’t go overboard. There was no Pinterest table, no coordinated decorations, no Easter roast, no elaborate anything. We had a vase of flowers. We had a bluebell forest. We had a croquet set with missing pieces and a husband who hid eggs in the dark at five in the morning and children who decided to keep believing in magic even after they didn’t have to.

And then those same children put on costumes in the afternoon and walked into the forest like they owned it, which, to be fair, they kind of do.

It was our first Easter here, and we looked around at the property - at what it is now and what it’s going to become - and felt something I’ve been trying to put into words all day.

Grateful, I think. Just genuinely, simply grateful.

Simple and beautiful and ours, at our little castle.

And the Easter Bunny, for the record, has excellent taste in chocolate.

One more thing: if you’re a paid subscriber, I put the full video of our Easter day up for you this week. Twelve minutes of the bluebell egg hunt, the croquet, the fairy and the wizard in the forest, and everything in between. The real version, as it happened. You can find it here.

And if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, that’s the kind of thing waiting for you on the other side. Just saying.

If this is the first thing you’ve read from Once Upon a Castle, there’s a lot more where this came from. The renovation, the neighbors, the bluebell forest, the chickens, and the ongoing beautiful mess of building a life inside a French château. Paid subscribers get access to Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time - the decisions, the tradeoffs, the design details, and everything we’re figuring out as we go. If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, come stay a while.

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Not really in a charming way. In the way a printer error is consistent. Everything takes longer, your boots never fully dry, and the sky feels like it’s been set to ‘dishwater’ for three straight weeks. We’ve had cozy moments, yes. But at a certain point you start taking personal offense at a drizzle and feel absolutely starved for some color.

So for my birthday, we staged a small escape. Saint-Malo. Salt air. A little sun. The ocean doing what it does best: resetting you. —> Read the full trip recap here.

It worked immediately.

We walked for hours. Flew a kite (after digging it out of the “why do we own this?” pile). Ate sushi. Played games at night. Everyone slept like rocks.

And then, while driving through town, we saw something that brought the color back to my cheeks.

Camellias. Everywhere.

Not a few brave blooms. Full, theatrical camellias, as though Saint-Malo never got the February memo.

I kept stopping in front of gardens like some sort of lurking paparazzi. You know the feeling when you catch yourself staring at someone else’s front yard and then you have to pretend you’re checking a message? That was me, repeatedly, whispering to Sean: Look at this one. Look at the colors. How is it doing that in February?

I came home with the most dangerous thing you can bring back to a château.

A new priority.

The garden problem (which is actually a timing problem)

Here’s the inconvenient truth we’re starting to understand.

Renovating a building feels like progress because it’s immediate. You remove something, you replace something, and you can point to a wall and say, we did that.

Gardens don’t work like that.

Gardens ask you to make decisions now for a payoff you won’t see for years. Trees especially. Anything woody and meaningful is basically a long-term investment plan (not ideal for impatient personalities like mine).

That’s why most château content focuses on interiors first. The house delivers before-and-after dopamine. The garden delivers…time.

But those Saint-Malo camellias made something click.

A good garden isn’t just pretty. It’s timed, it’s designed.

Bloom timing. Winter structure. Where your eyes land in February when everything else looks like bare sticks and damp soil. Where the path pulls you. Where you pause. Where the château looks best from. Where the river becomes a feature instead of a complication. Where the wind is blocked, where the sun hits, where the soil drains, where it doesn’t.

It’s a lot of planning. And yes, a little bit of mystery.

And now that we’re on our own land, with our own blank slate, I’m realizing the garden is not a side quest.

It’s the slowest, most consequential part of this whole project.

The garden we still miss

Before we bought this place, we rented a farmhouse for two and a half years on the grounds of another château. It came with the kind of garden that ruins you for normal expectations.

It was walled, which meant it was protected. Not metaphorically, but truly protected from deer, wild boar, and other woodland residents who believe your vegetables are a communal resource.

There were grape vines climbing the stone walls. Roses framing the front door. Ivy in the good, storybook sense (not the we-will-pay-for-this-later sense). Flowering pear trees. Rosemary that bloomed and contributed to our al fresco summer meals.

And there was an ornamental cherry tree that could genuinely reset your standards for spring. We put the kids’ playhouse and swing under it. When it bloomed, the whole garden turned rosy. When the petals fell, the ground looked like someone had scattered tiny pink stars everywhere.

I miss that garden in a way that is frankly inconvenient.

Because it was small enough to understand, and finished enough to feel like we were living inside a completed idea.

Here, we have something bigger. More land, more possibilities.

Also more: where do we even begin?

The unfashionable thought: what if we start outside?

We’ve talked so much about the coach house, the rentals, the interior projects, the pool, the forest, the windows.

But since Saint-Malo, I keep returning to one question. What if we put more attention on the gardens first?

Not instead of the boring essentials. We are not postponing safety, heating, or anything that keeps the place functional. We’re not going to become the people with a gorgeous border of tulips and a boiler that only works when it feels like it.

But there are a few fun interior projects we could delay. Bedroom upgrades. Bathroom prettiness. Cosmetic things that can wait.

Because the garden has one unfair advantage over everything else - it takes time you cannot buy back later.

We went to a nursery recently and asked how long it would take for an ornamental cherry tree to feel established.

The answer was, “Maybe five years.”

Five.

Five??

Look, I am not naturally patient. I don’t enjoy waiting. I have a strong internal clock that keeps (scream) whispering, your kids will not be this age forever.

If we want a treehouse that feels magical to them, we should probably build it while they still think treehouses are cool.

If we want them growing up with a garden they can actually run through, pick from, hide in, and remember, we have to start now.

And Sean and I are not spring chickens either. I want us to enjoy the dream while we still have the energy to get excited about it and build it, not only manage it.

So yes. We’re learning to do the boring thing.

Start the slow stuff early.

Ugh.

And yay!

What we know we want

Here’s the current list. It’s ambitious. It will be edited by budget, time, my husband, and reality. But it’s where our minds keep going.

• A kitchen garden, preferably walled.

• Expanding the orchard. We’ve already planted 11 fruit trees alongside the existing apple trees.

• A pond for ducks.

• One or two fountains.

• Brick or stone footpaths.

• A cutting garden for flowers.

• Spring bulbs, scattered in a way that looks intentional but not fussy.

• A greenhouse (maybe two - we’ve also entertained the greenhouse-in-the-forest-for-dinners fantasy, because apparently we’re like this now).

• Open grassy areas for soccer, croquet, and the occasional Downton Abbey tea party.

• Stone walls and gates where they make sense.

• A wildflower meadow.

• Ivy and wisteria on the château walls, if we can do it without making future-us regret everything.

• And the forest, which deserves its own post. Restoring a forest sounds romantic until you realize it involves endless brambles, deadwood, and removing giant piles of branches and brush.

And then there are garden rooms. Because once you start thinking this way, you can’t stop.

• A moon garden. Whites and silvers. Plants that show off at night.

• A star garden, to honor a piece of this château’s history.

• And on our slope, we have been slightly obsessed with the idea of a garden theatre. If you’ve seen Arne Maynard’s, you know. Carved rows in a hillside, a ‘stage’ below. Ours would be near the river. It would be absurd and wonderful and probably not the first thing we do, but the idea won’t go away.

And…that’s all! (cue nervous laugh).

We’ve become those people

We’re deep in gardening books. We’re watching Monty Don like it’s a certification program. We’re having conversations that would have bored our past selves to tears.

Our son recently said, Why are you always watching garden videos?

And our daughter, without looking up, said: Because they want to make a garden like The Secret Garden.

She knows us so well.

That’s the whole thesis.

So this is the beginning of our garden chapter. We’re still in the phase where everything looks bare and you feel slightly unqualified to be making decisions about acres of land. But we’re noticing patterns, collecting information, and starting to plan.

I’ll share what we learn as we go. What works in our region. What we plant. What we regret. What surprises us. What the land seems to want (and reject). And how we’re trying to design something that feels both beautiful and livable.

Both are part of the story.

For paid subscribers, the companion Private Chapter is up:

It’s our working plan, with zones, priorities, and the first 90 days.

À bientôt,
Kamille

A note for new readers: we’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and writing it all down here.

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Here’s the unglamorous truth: big properties don’t need more ideas. They need sequencing.

This is our working garden plan: the zones, the order of operations, what’s already planted, what we’re doing next, and how we’re avoiding the classic mistake of building a beautiful dream directly on top of future plumbing.

1) The garden brief (what the garden needs to do)

We’re not designing a show garden. We’re designing a family garden that can carry a lot of life.

Here’s what it has to do for us:

• It must feel beautiful in winter, not only in June.

• It must have places where children can be children and play without caution.

• It must become more abundant over time, not more complicated.

• It must include food, not just flowers.

• It must be legible. Meaning, it should feel like a series of places with purpose, not five acres of indecision (which is what it feels like currently).

• And it must be buildable in phases, without needing a full-time Downton Abbey staff.

2) The constraints (the land’s non-negotiables)

These are the things we’re designing around, not against.

Winter reality: bare trees, damp ground, low light. We need structure and color that holds when everything else is asleep.

Slope: parts of the property have a pitched slope, which affects paths, drainage, and where “rooms” can realistically sit.

River: beautiful, but not neutral. We have to consider how it affects humidity, floods in winter, the plant choices, and a few spots where we want to linger and create little ‘viewing beaches’ (and perhaps kayak entry points).

Wind and exposure: we need sheltered moments, so we can still enjoy the outdoors even on mildly windy days

Time: trees, hedging, and slow gardens need a head start.

Budget: phased is the only sane route.

If you want the actual working file, here’s where it begins: our zones, sequence, and the first 90-day plan.

Read more

I remember strolling innocently into our very first château viewing.

We arrived excited, camera-ready, living our best “this could be the one” life.

The realtor walked up to us, barely finished her obligatory bonjour, and asked:

“Do you have the money to buy in cash?”

Not “Do you love the kitchen?”
Not “Can you imagine Christmas here?”
Not even “Would you like to see the garden?”

Cash. Immediately.

At the time, I felt confused. Slightly offended. Like…excuse me, madame, we are here to fall in love with turrets, not be interrogated at the door.

Later, I understood. In France, especially in château-land, that question is not rude. It’s a sorting mechanism.

Because the bank part can turn a dream into a six-month slow-motion suspense film.

Want the full actionable playbook? The companion chapter is here: How to Get a French Loan as an American (bank list & links, dossier checklist, and our exact process).

Read it here

The part Americans are not emotionally prepared for

When we first started looking seriously, we heard the escrow process often takes six months.

Six months.

We came from California, where we bought a rental property and closed in thirty days. Thirty! We are conditioned to believe that if you have the documents and a pulse, you can be handed keys by next Tuesday.

France is not like that. France is more like…France.

• long pauses

• administrative steps

• polite emails that contain no information

• and a lot of waiting to see if someone, somewhere, decides they would rather not

It is not that nothing is happening. It is that everything is happening…behind a curtain…at the speed of a beret-wearing snail.

And the biggest reason for the long timeline is, bluntly: the bank process can involve multiple refusals. People apply, get denied, apply again, get denied again, revise, re-submit, wait, follow up, wait some more, and suddenly you are six weeks older and have developed a minor allergy to the word “dossier.”

If you’re a multimillionaire buying in cash…

First, I love that for you.

Second, this post may not be your personal struggle story.

Buying in cash eliminates a huge amount of friction. It also eliminates the part where your entire future is being silently judged by strangers who will not tell you why they don’t like you.

That said, even cash buyers should remember: if you pour every last cent into the purchase, you still need serious runway for life, maintenance, and upgrades. Château ownership has a way of producing surprise expenses when you least expect them.

If you’re not buying in cash, welcome

Before we moved to France, we heard every version of the story:

• “It’s impossible for Americans to get a loan in France.”

• “It’s totally doable.”

• “My friend’s cousin’s neighbor got one in 2016, so you’ll be fine.”

• “Just walk into a bank and ask.” (This advice is cute. Cutie cute.)

I did meet one American friend who got a French loan about six and a half years ago, and she kindly gave me her bank contact. That was our first real lead.

And here’s what we learned the hard way:

Six years ago is not the same universe.

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Why banks have become wary of Americans

This is not a personal attack. It’s just the current climate.

During the pandemic, there was a surge of foreign buyers. People fell in love with French properties online, sometimes bought without ever visiting, and arrived with a very romantic idea of what château ownership would feel like.

Then reality arrived, too.

Reality looks like:

• ongoing maintenance

• expensive upgrades

• slower timelines

• French paperwork that does not care about your feelings or time

• and the fact that you can’t always solve problems by ordering something quickly

A sizeable chunk of those buyers eventually sold. Some properties sat for years. And banks ended up with a category of loans they no longer felt excited to repeat.

So now, many banks see Americans and think:

starry-eyed, far away, high risk, extra paperwork, uncertain outcomes.

Not always fair, but it’s real.

The key thing banks care about

French underwriting doesn’t just evaluate you. It evaluates the property.

That’s why “pre-approval” doesn’t really exist the way it does in the U.S.

In the U.S., you can get a pre-approval letter based on your finances, then shop confidently.

In France, the bank often wants to see:

• what you’re buying

• where it is

• how liquid it would be if they had to resell

• and whether it looks like a crumbling problem

Which is why château loans can be…delicate.

Our first big refusal

The first bank we pursued felt promising. We had a personal referral. We put together what I considered an impressive application.

We submitted. We waited a week. Two weeks. I followed up. “Would love an update!”

They told us it was still being reviewed. Lots more following up.

Finally, six weeks later, we received a short email: refused.

No reason.

I called immediately, trying to understand what we could fix. They told me they weren’t obligated to explain. Eventually, they offered one sentence:

“We don’t feel comfortable loaning on a château.”

This is the part where I would like to time travel and gently shake everyone involved. Would have been wonderful to know that six weeks ago. (spoken in a rage whisper)

Château prejudice is real

Here’s the unromantic truth:

Banks can be reluctant to lend on châteaux because:

• they can take longer to resell

• the buyer pool is smaller

• and people sometimes romanticize the idea, then panic mid-renovation and list it again

At one point, a mortgage broker even said something like:

“Could you buy something that isn’t a château…or at least doesn’t look like one?”

Meaning: could we buy a property without towers.

No, madame! I need the towers!

Which gave the broker a headache, but I pushed on. I was determined to find a way to realize our dream without compromising.

Why a French job makes everything easier

If you have a high-paying, full-time job in France, the process is usually much smoother. It’s familiar income. Familiar documents. Familiar contracts.

But if you’re relying on U.S. income, the bank has more work to do:

• different systems

• different tax documents

• different employment structures

• and often more perceived risk

Sometimes applicants get refused quickly simply because it’s “too complicated.”

Which is maddening, but again: real.

The turning point that finally got us a yes

After enough refusals to develop a new personality, we got smarter. We stopped treating it like one application. We treated it like a pipeline.

We eventually worked with a mortgage broker who specializes in helping Americans get French loans. We did not end up closing through them, but they were incredibly helpful, and honestly, if you want to preserve your sanity, this route is worth considering.

Brokers charge a fee. We were quoted around €5,000 by one and €6,000+ by another for the type of purchase we were making.

But what you get is:

• banks that are actually open to your profile

• knowledge of each bank’s quirks

• and a strategy instead of guesswork

We ran multiple applications at once. If one bank said no, we still had momentum elsewhere.

And we finally got our yes when we shifted to the château we ended up buying.

It still had towers.

But it was more bank-friendly in the ways banks care about:

• more obviously livable

• more obviously resellable

• in a location they liked better

• less “romantic fantasy” on paper

And suddenly, the tone changed from “non” to “okay…maybe.”

The part nobody tells you about the “promesse”

Many foreign buyers put “obtaining a loan” as a condition in the promesse (the purchase agreement). That protects you, but it also reveals the trap.

Because if you cannot obtain a loan, the sale collapses. It happens all the time. People don’t realize how many refusals they might face until they’re already emotionally attached to the property.

A few realities to know going in

• France typically uses a 35% debt-to-income guideline.

• Banks prefer stable income. Freelancers and contractors can be a harder sell, especially with foreign (U.S.) income.

• Some banks will only count 70–80% of your foreign income.

• If you have a strong portfolio, there can be other paths (asset-backed structures, collateral approaches, or relationship banking). Not always, but sometimes.

So is it possible?

Yes. It can be done.

But it is not the smooth, clean “pre-approval then shopping spree” experience Americans expect. It’s more like:

find the property, build the dossier, find the right institution, be patient, be strategic, and do not take refusals personally.

Which is irritating advice, because the refusals feel very personal when you’ve spent six weeks waiting.

But there is hope, especially if you approach it like a process, not a single make-or-break application.

If you want the full actionable playbook, with links to the banks that said yes (and the banks that said ‘non’) the companion chapter is here:

And if you have questions, drop them in the comments. I’m happy to answer what I can.

If your question is specific (your income mix, the bank responses you’re getting, or “is this normal?”), paid subscribers can also ask inside the private subscriber chat.

À bientôt,
Kamille

Note: This is our real experience and what worked for our file. I’m not a bank, CPA, or financial advisor, so this isn’t financial advice. Use it as a guide, then verify details with your lender, notaire, or a qualified professional.

New here? Start with:

Want the renovation chapters? Castle Diaries is where I share the full behind-the-scenes: what we’re doing next, what it costs, and the decisions as we make them.

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If the free post was the story, this is the part where I hand you the clipboard.

Not a “course” or a fantasy. Just the working notes.

Because if you are trying to get a French mortgage as an American without a French paycheck, the difference between misery and progress is usually one thing:

A system.

This is the system we used, what we’d do again, and what I’d skip.

If you’re new: I’m Kamille. American in rural France, restoring a château and documenting the cultural whiplash. Subscribe if you like smart stories with mud on the hem.

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1) First: the honest question to ask before you apply anywhere

French banks are evaluating two things at once:

You and the property.

So before you start applying, ask:

Is this property bank-friendly?

Not “is it beautiful,” because obviously it is. More like:

• Is it clearly habitable right now?

• Is it in a location the bank considers liquid?

• Does it have obvious resale appeal?

• Is it a château in a way that reads “historic home,” or a château in a way that reads “future financial headache”?

I hate this reality. But pretending it doesn’t exist will waste months.

2) Why you can’t really get pre-approved (and what to do instead)

In the U.S., pre-approval gives you shopping confidence.

In France, what people often call “pre-approval” is more like:

• a bank conversation

• a preliminary review

• or a letter saying you have funds available

But the final decision often depends on the property itself.

What you can do that helps:

• build your dossier (file) in advance

• get your French account situation clean

• be ready to submit quickly

• and shortlist banks that are actually open to your profile

Quick tool: French mortgage calculator
If you want to sanity-check monthly payments while you’re comparing scenarios, this calculator is helpful.

Below: the dossier checklist, outreach pipeline, scripts, and our bank and broker list.

Read more

If you’ve ever bought something beautiful and old and then immediately thought, “Perfect. Now I’ll simply improve every part of this at once,” welcome. You are my people.

Because here’s the truth of château ownership so far: it’s not one project. It’s a living organism made of stone, weather, bureaucracy, and a suspicious number of things that can break on a Sunday.

When we moved in, I assumed the early months would feel like a gentle settling-in. A slow walk through the gardens. A few charming discoveries. Maybe a tasteful cup of tea while I studied a planting plan like a Victorian heroine.

Instead, the château handed me a clipboard and said: “Choose your priorities or be consumed.”

So this post is the system we’ve started using to triage our way through the chaos. Not just to get things done, but to stay sane while doing them. Because the list is endless, the weather is moody, and time, it turns out, does not speed up simply because you bought eleven fruit trees.

A note for new readers: we’re an American family restoring a small château in rural France, and I write the story here each week. If you’d like these letters in your inbox, you can subscribe free.

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The State of Things: Winter, Blank Slate Edition

We’ve arrived in that particular season where everything looks a bit like a charcoal drawing. No leaves. No flowers. No visual cues. Just tree silhouettes and damp air and the occasional moment of standing in the forest thinking, “Is that an oak, or am I just feigning competence?”

We’ve already done a handful of meaningful things:

• We had the entire façade cleaned, because it was genuinely grimy, and now the turrets look like they’ve rejoined civilization.

• We (achem, my husband and son) planted eleven fruit trees, adding to the three established apple trees already here. Peach, plum, apple, cherry, pear. A tiny orchard with big ambitions.

• We started clearing: brambles, bamboo, debris piles, and we removed a couple of dangerous dead trees.

• We’ve met a surprising number of neighbors, despite the language barrier, and learned that community here is built slowly, in small conversations, and always with some gateaux and alcohol.

• We’ve had ongoing heater issues because of course we have.

• We met with a pool guy and began the very glamorous process of figuring out pool placement and safety enclosures, which is less “Champagne by the water” and more “How do we keep our children alive while also preserving the vibe?”

• We’ve been studying gardening books like people cramming for an exam called: “How Not to Ruin 11 Acres.”

  

And still, the list grows faster than we can cross things off.

Which brings me to triage.

Why Triage Is the Only Way to Château

When you own a place like this, the temptation is to start with the thing you want most.

The pond.

The fountain.

The new kitchen.

The walled potager.

The ornamental cherry tree that will take five years to become the version of itself you saw in your imagination.

But the château does not care what you want most.

The château cares about order of operations.

It cares about what must happen first, what will make everything else easier, and what will cause you the least amount of regret three months from now when it’s raining sideways and you’re on the phone with a technician trying to explain the concept of “overflowing septic” in your second language.

So we started asking a few very unromantic questions.

And they’re saving us.

The Château Triage Framework

The method we’re using to decide what gets done next

1) Safety First

If it can hurt someone, it goes to the top of the list.

This is not glamorous, but it is the fastest way to avoid expensive disasters and needless drama.

Examples for us right now:

• Dangerous dead trees that could fall in the forest or near paths on windy days.

• Anything related to pool safety and enclosure planning.

• Septic systems, aka the unglamorous underworld, and a replacement that is not optional.

• Anything electrical or heating related that could become a bigger issue if ignored.

Safety is the category that quietly protects everything else. It’s also the category most people skip in favor of “pretty,” and then regret later.

2) Keep the House Livable

You cannot restore a château if living in it makes you miserable.

This is where the day-to-day systems matter: heat, water, basic comfort, and the small things that keep everyone regulated enough to continue.

For us, that means:

• Stabilizing the heater situation so we aren’t living in suspense.

• Creating functional zones in the house so not everything feels like an unfinished project at once.

• Slowly making the “core” of the home feel usable and warm, even if the rest stays imperfect for a while.

This is where you become extremely practical and slightly boring, and it pays off.

3) Weather Windows

France has seasons, and certain tasks cannot be forced.

I want to be the kind of person who says “we can do anything!” but sometimes the correct answer is: not in February.

Right now, winter is limiting some of our bigger outdoor dreams. It’s harder to landscape when the land looks asleep and soggy. It’s harder to identify trees. It’s harder to plan what to remove and what to preserve when everything is bare.

So we’re leaning into winter-appropriate projects:

• Planning, mapping, measuring.

• Clearing brambles and invasive growth where we can.

• Meeting neighbors and learning the human side of the place.

• Making decisions that set us up for spring execution.

Winter is not the season for the entire transformation, but rather the season for positioning.

4) “Longest Lead Time Wins”

If something takes years to mature, it deserves attention earlier.

This is the category that surprised me the most, and also gives me mild anxiety.

Gardens take time. Orchards take time. Trees take time (as the saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago”). Everything beautiful seems to be on a multi-year schedule that does not care about your excitement.

The man at the nursery told me an ornamental cherry might take five years to look truly established.

Five years.

Which is both reasonable and…irritating.

But it’s also why we planted the fruit trees now. Not because we’ll get peaches next month, but because we want to look up in a few years and be grateful we started.

This category includes:

• Planting trees.

• Establishing the potager plan.

• Any long-term landscaping and ecosystem work.

• The forest restoration vision.

Even if the results are slow, the starting matters.

5) Revenue Projects

If you want this château to become sustainable, you need at least one project that starts paying for the others.

For us, that likely means the coach house.

We love the romantic projects, but we’re trying to be smart (trying). Getting one outbuilding ready to rent creates breathing room. It helps fund the next phase, and it makes the whole thing feel less like a beautiful financial bonfire.

So while we want to start everything, we’re asking:

• What can we finish first?

• What has the clearest path from “work” to “income”?

• What will make the project more sustainable long-term?

So yes, the coach house is calling.

6) The “Heart Projects”

These are the projects that keep you emotionally invested.

Because if every week is pipes and paperwork, you will lose your mind.

Heart projects are small, visible wins. They’re the things that make you feel like you’re actually building the dream, not just maintaining a crumbling relic.

For us right now:

• The orchard.

• Any small garden shaping.

• Pool planning.

• Clearing a path in the forest.

• Even choosing future fountain locations, because it’s a form of hope.

These do not always need to be practical. They need to be motivating.

Our Triage, in One Glance

What we’re prioritizing right now, in real time

Top Tier: Must Not Ignore

• Fixing the heater situation so the house is reliably livable.

• Continuing safety clearing in the forest and on the grounds.

• Pool planning, including safety enclosure decisions, because that affects timeline and placement.

Second Tier: Set Up Spring Success

• Winter mapping and identifying: where are the paths, what’s growing where, what feels like the “natural” zones of the property.

• Continued clearing of brambles and invasive plants.

• Neighbor conversations and learning local wisdom (because locals always know what works here).

Third Tier: The Big Dream Projects

• Coach house renovation planning with a goal of summer readiness.

• Kitchen garden direction and design, including the eventual wall.

• Longer-term garden plan and where we want the major “moments” to be: pond, fountain, orchard expansion, wildflower areas, forest restoration.

And hovering over everything: patience.

Because if you rush an old house, it will humble you on principle.

The Emotional Part (Because It’s Real)

There is something uniquely humbling about owning land that will outlive you.

It changes the way you think. It nudges you toward stewardship instead of aesthetics. Toward decisions that are less “what’s pretty” and more “what lasts.”

But if I’m being honest, this whole patience and practicality approach does not come naturally to me.

I am not a naturally patient person. I am a “let’s do it now, while the spark is bright” person. I love momentum. I love the feeling of making something beautiful quickly, dramatically - everything, everywhere, all at once.

And there’s this other layer, the one I don’t always care to admit, which is time.

Not in a panicky way every day, but certainly in a persistent way. Our kids are small right now, which is the entire point. I want them to grow up inside the finished versions of these dreams, not just the planning phase. I want the treehouse built while they still think treehouses are the height of civilization. I want the garden to be established while they still want to pick berries and “help” and run muddy through the paths.

And Sean and I are not spring chickens either. We want to enjoy this. We want to have the energy and vitality for the good parts, not just the logistics. I do not want to look up in ten years and realize we spent their whole childhood making lists and fixing electrics.

So yes, the dream makes you slow down. But it also makes you feel urgency.

That tension is real, and it’s basically the emotional heartbeat of this project.

You cannot do everything at once.

Not if you want to stay married. Not if you want to stay healthy. Not if you want your kids to remember this as magical, not stressful.

And that’s the point of triage.

Not to make the dream smaller, but to make it possible, in the right order, with enough breathing room that we can actually enjoy it as we go.

What Comes Next

If you’ve been following along, you know we’re in the early blank-slate phase.

The turrets are freshly cleaned. The orchard is newly planted. The forest is still a mystery. The pool is still a question mark. The heater is still occasionally auditioning for the role of villain.

But we’re learning how to choose.

And I think that might be the real work of restoring a château. Not just stone, paint, or gardens, but the decisions, the order. The discipline of doing one thing well before you run off to start twelve more.

More soon 💫
-Kamille

A note for new readers: we’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and writing it all down here.

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Since I was a little girl, like most little girls, I dreamed of living in a fairytale castle one day.

Not in an “I will definitely do this by age 30” kind of way. More in the way you dream about becoming a mermaid, or owning a pet fox. A childhood fantasy you love, but don’t really expect to materialize into your adult life.

And yet, here we are.

If you’re new here: we’re an American family who moved from California to France a little over two years ago with two young children. My husband was completely on board with this dream, which is still, to this day, one of the most romantic things about him. When we first arrived, we made a decision that felt unglamorous but turned out to be everything: we rented first.

We could have tried to buy something quickly, right away, with the intensity of people who have just discovered French stone walls and lost all reason. But we wanted a real lay of the land. We wanted to understand the regions, the pace, the people, and whether we actually wanted to put roots down here. So we rented a farmhouse on the grounds of a château.

And not just any château. The kind of place that feels like it should come with a staff, a string quartet, and a person whose job is simply to walk around handing you letters sealed with wax. It had everything: outbuildings, stables, an orangery, a river, fountains, an enormous walled garden, bridges, orchards, and a private forest that went on for what felt like miles. At first, that was the dream.

But then we lived next to one, and reality arrived wearing muddy boots and carrying a spreadsheet.

The Reality Check We Didn’t Expect

The first thing living on château grounds teaches you is this: beauty is not free. Not the kind of beauty that comes with roofs, gravel drives, drainage, endless tree maintenance, stonework, and heating systems that behave like moody aristocrats. The second thing it teaches you is that the reason people sell these properties is often very simple. They cannot keep up anymore.

On viewings, we heard a variety of stories, but the theme was consistent: it’s too much, or it’s too expensive, or it’s too hard without help. Châteaux were built for a world that came with full staffs, inside and out. Downton Abbey style. But that kind of living slowly faded, and now a full-time staff is something only the ultra-wealthy can maintain without blinking. So many properties end up in limbo: inheritance disputes, families scattered to Paris for work, children who love the château but cannot afford to run it. Grand buildings with nobody to hold them up anymore.

That was our first major pivot. We still wanted a château. We just wanted one we could actually live in and care for, without becoming exhausted caretakers of a dream that was quietly eating us alive.

Also, a small but important thing about château shopping in France: the listings are endless. Truly endless. At any given time there are hundreds, maybe thousands, for sale. You could search forever, and honestly, it would be a lovely way to lose an entire decade. They’re all beautiful in their own way. They’re all slightly different. And even after you choose “the one,” you’ll keep seeing new châteaux pop up and feel a brief pang of longing, like you’ve just walked past a particularly handsome stranger.

At some point, you have to stop scrolling, choose your criteria, and commit. Otherwise château hunting becomes less of a search and more of a lifestyle.

The Part Nobody Tells You About “Château Prices”

There’s a moment when you first start looking at château listings, especially if you’re coming from Los Angeles or London, where your jaw hits the floor. 1.2 million euros in France can buy you a real estate fantasy: acres of land, outbuildings, maybe a pool, maybe an orangery, maybe enough rooms to lose a family member for days. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, that same number might buy you a condo, or a small house with a small yard, depending on the neighborhood.

So at first, it looks like a steal. Then you start learning what comes with the price tag that is not on the listing.

Notaire fees are stacked on top of the listing price, and they are not small. Then there are the ongoing costs: insurance, taxes, heating, utilities, upkeep. And most older châteaux need upgrades at some point, whether it’s plumbing, electrical, roofing, drainage, or insulation. France pays workers fairly, which I genuinely respect, but it also means restoration is real money, and you need to be honest about what you can take on.

And then there are the hidden “yes, but” details that you only discover once you start asking questions.

One château we visited was painfully romantic. Beautiful stonework, a stunning orangery, and even an abandoned greenhouse with rose vines climbing in and out of missing glass panes, practically begging to be restored. The château overlooked a gorgeous lake. It was the kind of place where you start speaking in future tense too early.

Then the realtor said, almost casually, that the large field between the château and the lake, the big sweeping front yard that made the whole place feel like a painting, was rented by a local farmer. We nodded politely, assuming he meant for the season. No. It was a longstanding contract. A very French contract. The kind where you “own” the land, but you also absolutely do not.

We asked when it ended, and he said it ends when the farmer dies. Then he added, almost as a footnote, that these contracts are often passed down to the farmer’s children, and the owners cannot end them early. So you buy the lakefront château, and then you watch someone else use your lakefront land indefinitely. The price was starting to make more sense.

That was the moment we really understood something: château listings can look like bargains until the fine print starts quietly revealing itself.

We’re Cottage People in Castle Clothing

Here’s another thing we didn’t expect. During our time living on château grounds, we fell completely in love with the farmhouse. Its cottage feel. Its warmth. The way a single candle made it feel cozy rather than theatrical. It made us question whether we really wanted something grand.

We have always been more cottage people than palace people. Think the Weasleys’ house rather than Malfoy Manor.

Many of the châteaux we visited were stunning, but had a slightly cold energy. Not just because of the insulation, but because of the layout. Classic châteaux tend to be segmented: central hall, grand salon, separate dining room, bureau or library, separate kitchen. It’s romantic. It’s historical. It’s also not how our family lives.

We did not want to be spread out in separate wings, raising our children like tiny aristocrats who communicate via shouted messages and lost socks. We wanted warmth and togetherness. A space where our life could feel connected.

And we wanted manageable. Not small or easy, just…possible.

We kept returning to one question: what can we care for without losing ourselves? And a second question, the one that really mattered: what will not feel like a burden to our children someday?

Our Non-Negotiables (Yes, Including Towers)

Once we got honest about what we actually wanted, our list became surprisingly specific. We wanted to stay within about 1.5 hours of where we were renting, because we love the region and we’ve built real friendships here. We did not want to be too far from Paris, because travel and culture matter to us, and we wanted ease of transportation. We did not want a classified château. The restrictions can be intense, and we wanted the freedom to customize our home.

We wanted water: a river, a stream, a pond, a lake. Something nearby. We wanted a lot of light. Some older châteaux have thick stone walls and fewer windows, which is historically authentic but can be quite dark. That was a deal-breaker for me.

We wanted privacy, trees, and not to be on a main road. We saw one beautiful château that ticked many boxes, but it sat beside a busy road, and the noise and safety concerns killed the dream instantly.

We wanted a chapel. We wanted a forest. We wanted at least two outbuildings for future guest stays. And yes, I wanted towers. I realize adult women are not supposed to have tower requirements, but if you’re going to do the castle thing, you might as well do it properly. I wanted at least two towers, and I wanted them Goldilocks-style: not too fortressy, not too thin, not too fake.

The One That Felt Like Home

And then we found it. It ticked every box, which was so rare it felt suspicious.

It has the two fairytale towers. It has a river. It has a forest with trails. It has a chapel tucked into the woods. It has the right number of outbuildings, enough to dream, not so many that you feel doomed. It has a lot of windows and natural light, which was one of our biggest non-negotiables. It also has a more open main living area, which is unusual in châteaux and instantly made us feel like we could live here as a family without being scattered.

It’s quiet. It’s private. It feels like a home, not a museum. We weren’t buying a showpiece. We were buying a place we could raise our children in, renovate slowly, and still like each other at the end.

The only thing it didn’t have from our list was a walled garden, but we’re already planning to create that ourselves by building a wall around the kitchen garden.

Now we’re planning renovations, learning the rhythm of the property, and slowly stepping into what it means to bring a place like this back to life. Not quickly. Not perfectly. But thoughtfully.

And I cannot wait to share the next chapters with you.

More soon 💫
-Kamille

For paid subscribers, the companion Castle Diaries is up, with photos and notes from each viewing. If you’re not paid yet, you’ll see the option to upgrade when you click through 👇

Sometimes that version is true. But there’s also the real version, which involves driving an hour to see a place that looks like a fairytale from the outside and feels like a gothic novel on the inside. Or falling in love with a lakefront view only to learn you will own the land in front of it in the same way you “own” a parking spot you are not allowed to park in.

We toured seven châteaux we did not buy. Each one taught us something about France, old stone, hidden fine print, and our own limits. Some were breathtaking. Some were a lot. Some were almost ours until the banks said non. If you’ve ever wondered why people fall in love with French château listings and then mysteriously end up somewhere else, it’s usually not because they changed their minds. It’s because the details tend to appear right after you start imagining Christmas there.

Ok. Here are the seven.

Read more

1. Buy a château in France.

2. Fly to the U.S. and return in early November.

3. Give yourself two weeks to move.

4. Get violently ill the day before moving day.

5. Do it anyway.

It’s character-building. It’s also deeply stupid.

For context, we’re an American family who moved from California to France a little over two years ago with two young children. We rented a farmhouse while we slowly explored regions and tried to do this thoughtfully, not impulsively. And now, somehow, we’re living in a seven-bedroom château in the French countryside. Still pinching ourselves. Still asking “why is that outlet making that noise?” like it’s normal.

The first two weeks were not elegant.

They were MEMORABLE.

Two weeks to go, and the farmhouse was in open-tab chaos

We got back from the States in early November and immediately entered what I can only describe as a living situation with the energy of a tornado that had developed a strong interest in cardboard boxes.

The farmhouse was in disarray. Half-packed boxes. Lists everywhere. Random objects migrating into rooms they didn’t belong in. The emotional atmosphere of a place that knows it’s about to be left behind.

We were excited, yes. But the house itself wasn’t exactly cheerful during those two weeks. It felt like limbo. Like we were camping inside our own life.

And then, naturally, the day before the move…

Sean and I both got super sick.

Not “a little under the weather.” Not “a sniffle.”

Full fever, full body aches, full “why are we doing this” despair.

But no one else was going to do it for us. The château wasn’t going to move us in gently out of gratitude. The boxes weren’t going to pack themselves. So we did what parents do.

We continued. Poorly.

Moving Day: Thanksgiving, but make it French and miserable

Moving day was Thanksgiving Day, which feels poetic in hindsight. We had a moving company come to load the truck, which was arguably the only reason we didn’t die. Even so, Sean and I were basically ghosts floating through the day with fevers, trying to answer questions like “where should this go?” when we barely knew our own names.

It was misery. The kind where you stop complaining and just become quiet.

And then, that night, something happened that still makes me tear up un petit peu.

The owner of our rented farmhouse surprised us with a late-night Thanksgiving dinner…that she cooked for us in her château. Turkey, green beans, sweet potatoes, pecan pie. A full Thanksgiving, appearing out of nowhere in rural France, when we were sick and exhausted and barely holding it together.

It was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for us.

After that, we drove late at night to our new château, stumbled into bed, and collapsed like Victorian characters who had survived a storm at sea.

The next morning: Rain, darkness, and a power outage

The movers arrived the next morning with our things. It was pouring rain, gray and cold and heavy in the way a French November can be.

Within ten minutes of their arrival, the power went out.

Not “a breaker.” Not “one room.”

Everything. No electricity. No lights. No heat.

We immediately assumed the worst. We were running around the property like frantic new owners, convinced we’d discovered a major electrical issue that hadn’t been disclosed. We were already feverish and sleep-deprived, so obviously our brains went straight to catastrophe.

But then we learned: it was a city-wide outage. The first they’d had in years.

Naturally, it chose our move-in day.

So there we were. Movers carrying giant pieces of furniture up a spiral staircase in the dark. No lights. No heat. Rain outside. Boxes inside. Two parents with the flu trying to remember how to speak.

The power eventually came back on but…it was a vibe.

A very specific sort of château initiation ritual.

From one bedroom to seven

Once everything was in, it was overwhelming in the purest sense of the word.

We had gone from a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in Los Angeles 2.5 years ago…to a three-bedroom farmhouse in France…and now to a seven-bedroom, five-bath château (not even counting the outbuildings).

I don’t think your nervous system is meant to process that many rooms at once, especially while recovering from the flu.

And then our daughter got very sick. Like, super sick. For over a week.

Meanwhile, the kids had just started at a new school. Winter days were short and dark. We were driving them in the cold mornings and picking them up in the cold afternoons, feeling like we lived inside a rainy charcoal drawing.

It was dreary and demanding.

And yet, it was still exciting. Still strange. Still magical, in the odd way that new beginnings can be, even when they’re messy.

Christmas decorations before unpacking: A bold choice

By early December, the kids were putting on the pressure.

“Where is the Christmas tree?”

“Can we decorate now?”

“Is Christmas in the boxes?”

So we did what any sensible family does during a high-stress transition: we rummaged through piles of boxes and found the decorations and put the tree up before we had unpacked anything else.

This made the house significantly messier, but it also made it feel like home. Because it’s hard to be completely miserable when twinkle lights are involved.

At the same time, we were realizing: we were hosting family for Christmas. In two weeks, and in a house we hadn’t even lived in properly yet.

So we began the practical scavenger hunt: Do we have linens? Towels? Hand soap? Enough mugs? Enough chairs? Does anyone own a second toilet plunger?

Every day was an inventory. Every day was a new “how do we not embarrass ourselves” list.

Reinforcements arrive: The parents

Sean’s parents arrived about a week before the rest of the family, and I cannot overstate how helpful they were.

They helped us put rooms together. They helped us organize. They cooked meals and washed dishes. They spent time with the kids. They helped us see through the chaos. They even helped install our first reverse osmosis water filtration system, which sounds boring until you realize that clean, delicious water instantly makes you feel 85% more stable as a person.

We scrambled. We triaged. We made choices like:

“This room looks fine, shut the door.”

“This room is a crime scene, also shut the door.”

And somehow, we got there.

Christmas in a Château (not perfect, still wonderful)

Then everyone arrived.

There was jetlag. There were lingering colds. There were boxes in certain rooms. There were (several) corners that were absolutely not shiny and clean.

But it was still lovely.

We made memories, opened gifts, watched movies, baked cookies. We took long walks through the forest. We did those slow winter things that make you feel like you can breathe again.

And on Christmas morning, it snowed.

In a way that felt so perfectly timed, it was almost suspicious. 👀

It really did feel like a Christmas miracle, the kind you get in a movie, except our movie also included ibuprofen and a half-unpacked house.

Now: Quiet, blank slate, and the long view

Now most of the family has gone home, and we’re entering a new phase. The quieter one.

We’re taking walks around the property and discovering things slowly.

What is that flat stone in the middle of the field? Why is there a path there? How many animal trails are on this land, and who is using them? (We just got critter cams, because apparently we are those people now, and I’m not mad about it.)

The trees are bare. There are no flowers. No leaves. The garden is a blank slate, which feels both calming and slightly daunting.

We’ve purchased eleven fruit trees to add to a tiny orchard. And then reality taps you gently on the shoulder and whispers: it will be at least 1.5 years before you see fruit.

So we’re learning patience.

We’re prioritizing, making phone calls. Getting to know our town, our neighbors, and the rhythms of this place. We’re slowly shifting from “move-in survival mode” to “okay, let’s build a life here.”

It’s still overwhelming, at times.

But now it’s the good kind. The kind where you feel the weight of a dream becoming real, day by day.

More soon.

À bientôt,
Kamille

(Upcoming posts: the moving day details I can’t fit in here, why we chose this château, our renovation plans, and, eventually, the bank story. I’m still emotionally recovering from that one.)

A note for new readers: we’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and writing it all down here.

Explore the Chateau Renovations

If you want the next chapter, subscribe free. If you want the deeper, twice-monthly unfiltered letters, and to follow our chateau renovation, you can upgrade.

Subscribe now

Before I show you around, I want to say something plainly: I know how this sounds.

“We bought a château” is not a sentence I ever expected to say out loud, and I’m very aware that it can land as either magical or…mildly unhinged, depending on the day.

We’re proud, yes. We’re also grateful. And a little stunned. And still learning what it actually means to care for a property like this without romanticizing it into something it is not.

Because while it is beautiful, it is also old. It comes with real responsibilities, real costs, and real moments of standing in a hallway wondering why the light switch does absolutely nothing (true story).

But still, here we are.

For anyone new: we’re an American family who moved from California to France a little over two years ago with two young children. We rented a farmhouse, explored regions slowly, and tried to make thoughtful decisions instead of impulsive ones. This château is the result of a long, not-straight-line journey (I’ll tell that story soon). And today, I want to give you the very first tour, the before tour, the honest version, with both charm and beaucoup de peeling paint.

So. Come in.

Stop 1: The Exterior

This is a seven-bedroom château on 11 acres in western France. The land includes a private forest, and the property borders a river.

The first thing I want you to know is that we did not buy this because we wanted to feel like royalty. We bought it because we wanted a family home with space to breathe, and because we could see a future here: one that includes restoration, creating beautiful guest spaces, and building something long-term. Not fast. Not flashy. Just authentic and us.

But even more than that, we wanted a place where our children can really grow up outside. Space to roam and play, gardens we can shape over time, and the kind of daily life where you can step out the door and be in nature immediately. We want to grow food here, plant things we can tend for years, and slowly customize this property into the dream version of home for our family.

The château is not “done.” It is not styled. It is not a photoshoot backdrop (yet). It is a living place that needs care. But the bones are solid, and that mattered to us.

Stop 2: The Red Front Door

The front door, quintescentially placed on the side of one of the turrets, is red - the kind of red that looks like it’s been there forever (and maybe it has). Above it is beautiful stonework that made me pause the first time we visited, because it felt like the house was subtly reminding us: this isn’t new. Be gentle with it.

A good door does something important. It acts as a sort of magic portal that says: you’re entering a different world.

Not a perfect world. A whimsical one.

Stop 3: The Main Living Area

One of our favorite features is the main living area. It has an open-ish floor plan, which is surprisingly unusual in châteaux.

And it’s not just the layout. The ceiling has these centuries-old wood beams running across the entire space, which gives it the most wonderful Cotswolds cottage feel. It makes the room feel warm and lived-in, not too grand, not overwhelming, and definitely not cold. More “cozy family hearth” than “echoing palace.”

Old houses like this can be beautiful but very segmented: room after room after room. This space is different. It has light. It feels connected. It makes daily life feel doable.

And with kids, that matters. I don’t want to raise our children scattered across distant wings like a tiny royal family sending messages by courier. I want us together, hearing each other, eating together, being able to call out “who left the lights on?” without needing a map or an intercom.

This space is one of the places that made us think: we can actually live here while we renovate slowly.

Stop 4: Our Bedroom

Our bedroom has high ceilings and big windows, lovely, yes… and also a reminder that this house was not designed for modern expectations.

Because the windows are single-pane. All of them. Everywhere. Which means winter is a season you feel in your bones unless you’re proactive. In other words, it’s friggin freezing!

So right now it’s a combination of: beautiful light + thick socks + mild disbelief.

But it’s also peaceful. There’s something calming about waking up in a room with tall ceilings and green countryside outside the windows, even when you’re thinking about insulation and how desperately you want to change the hideous orange fabric wallpaper covering the walls.

Stop 5: A Guest Room (Potential in Peeling Paint Form)

Here’s a guest room as it exists today: peeling paint, aged everything, and a general sense of “I was last updated during a time when people smoked indoors.” It needs some major updating.

And yet, the proportions are good. The windows (not seen in the above image) are generous. The space has that old-house feeling of possibility.

I’m including this photo because I want to keep this tour honest. This is not an already-polished renovation reveal. It’s the start.

Stop 6: The River

The river is one of the quieter miracles here. It borders the property, and it brings a kind of calm that’s hard to explain until you’ve stood near it on a cold morning and listened.

It also reminds us that nature is in charge. This isn’t manicured estate living. The land is largely a blank slate. There’s almost no formal landscaping right now, which is intimidating, because it means we have to envision the garden from scratch, but also freeing, because we’re not inheriting someone else’s finished vision.

Stop 7: The Coach House

The coach house is a four-bedroom outbuilding that originally served the horse-drawn coaches. It’s one of the future guest spaces we’re most excited about, not because it’s glamorous now, but because it’s a solid building with a clear purpose.

It has that “this could be something” energy, which is basically the theme of this entire property.

Stop 8: The Gatehouse

The gatehouse, originally for the gatekeeper, needs a complete renovation inside. It’s currently less “storybook cottage” and more “project that will teach us patience.”

But it matters to the story of the place. And there’s something satisfying about restoring the smaller buildings too, not just the main château.

Stop 9: The Chapel

The chapel is the oldest building on the property, and it is in desperate need of restoration. It also has a lot of history, which I’ll go into in a future post. From what we’ve learned so far, it used to be a major draw for our local town.

It’s also uniquely tucked inside our forest, which still feels surreal. You follow a trail through the trees, and suddenly there’s a chapel, as if it has been waiting there patiently for centuries.

And yes, the bell is still in the bell tower. The kids love to ring it by pulling on a giant rope that dangles all the way down to the ground, while I stand beneath it holding my breath and hoping it does not come crashing through the ceiling.

It’s one of the spaces that makes me feel the most humility, because you realize you’re not just improving your own home, you’re caring for a piece of history that could easily be lost if no one intervenes.

We don’t have illusions that we’ll restore everything overnight. But we do feel responsible to do it thoughtfully.

Stop 10: The Private Forest

There’s a private forest with trails running through it, and it’s one of the most special parts of the property, even if we’re still getting to know it.

We arrived in winter, which means it’s been a little hard to “see the forest through the trees,” so to speak. With no leaves, it’s surprisingly difficult to identify what’s what. Everything is branches and silhouettes and mystery trunks, and I keep finding myself squinting like I’m about to be tested on it.

Over time, we want to bring the forest back to life in a thoughtful way. We’ll remove a few dead or dangerous trees, clear out some invasive brambles, and encourage more of the softer, storybook parts: ferns, mossy areas, and winding paths you actually want to linger on.

And apparently, in the spring, the forest is covered in bluebells.

We cannot wait :)

Stop 11: The Potting Shed + The Old Boulangerie

The potting shed needs restoring (which delights me), and the old boulangerie has the original oven, a detail that is both charming and slightly daunting, because it’s one more thing to steward properly.

I’m learning that old properties are like that: they give you gifts, and they also give you responsibilities disguised as gifts.

Where We Are Right Now

This is the beginning. The “before.” The part of the story that doesn’t always photograph as cleanly as the after, but it’s the most honest part.

We’re excited, and we’re also trying to stay sensible. We’re learning. We’re making lists. We’re taking things one step at a time, and trying to enjoy the fact that, somehow, this is our life now.

In upcoming posts, I plan to share:

• the bank saga (super dramatic/traumatic)

• what our preliminary renovation plans are (emphasis on preliminary)

• and why we chose this château over the others

For now, thank you for being here at the start. :)

À bientôt,
Kamille

A note for new readers: we’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and writing it all down here.

Explore the Chateau Renovations

If you want the next chapter, subscribe free. If you want the deeper, unfiltered letters, and to closely follow our chateau renovation, you can upgrade to paid.

Subscribe now