Our apartment in Los Angeles was 500 square feet.
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.
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.
Free subscribers get two essays a month. Paid subscribers get four, including Castle Diaries, where I document the full renovation in real time.
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.
Paid subscribers get two additional posts each month: two essays like this one, plus Castle Diaries, the renovation journal where I share the plans, the costs, the tradeoffs, and the decisions as we make them.
Reading your writing brings such pleasure to me. Thank you from my smiling face and heart.
Though I may never make it to France in this lifetime, please tell me again when your meadow bursts into purple blooms so I can book a flight to arrive at their peak.
You are going to make a beautiful physical book out of your writings some day, correct?
Another fun, witty, and charming post Kamille. Speaking from someone who knew you before you were the owner of seven buffets, two children with a matching set of turrets, and one husband who found himself in becoming lost.