Chateaux, manoirs et bla bla bla
not all chateaux are castles
The learning curve
“. . . A hundred years passed and a prince from another family spies the hidden castle during a hunting expedition and he remembers his father’s words: ‘Within the castle lies a beautiful princess who is doomed to sleep for a hundred years until a king’s son comes and awakens her.’ The prince then braves the tall trees, brambles and thorns which part at his approach, and enters the castle. He passes the sleeping castle folk and comes across the chamber where the Princess lies asleep on the bed…”
– From the original “Sleeping Beauty”
Chateau d’Usse, the castle that inspired Sleeping Beauty.
October, 2015. There we were, back home, wine-in-hand and enveloped by a pulsing fire, silently staring at the different ideas doodled on papers scattered over the coffee table.
”Let’s buy a castle!” Jeff said and an army of childhood bedtime-stories flooded the still landscape in front of my squinting eyes.
Little did we know about the lessons ahead. As it happens, a chateau is not just a stonewall-face flanked by tall white towers. It can be anything that has a tower or a façade big enough to fill the gap between your eyes. Doesn’t matter if it was built by a nobleman as a fortress in the Middle Ages and it escaped the angry hands of the revolutionaries, or if it was simply created to indulge the bourgeois ego of a railway contractor in late 1800s.
What is happening to the “happily ever after” backdrop I had envisioned? Before, I had believed a chateau was a little castle with a noble background. Then we discovered that anyone with a gold coin could make one, wealthy families built them as wedding presents! Even Queen Victoria’s dressmaker lived in a chateau he designed himself —not the kind of aristocracy we imagined when we started our search (please don’t take me for a snob, I’m a tailor myself).
To contribute to our confusion, each estate agent brought with them a portfolio of buildings. For example, a Gentilhomière, a nobleman’s home, is a rather large house, its shape and size reflecting the aesthetics of its time. Some have a tower to host the staircase, some look like a farmhouse, and others are a larger version of a Maison de Maître. A Maison de Maitre (in French, Master’s House), is a two-room-deep townhouse with a dual aspect entrance hall and two rooms to each side of the main door.
Lefr: large Maison de Maitre outside Le Mans / Right: Gorgeous Gentillhomiere north of Saumur (we actually considered buying it)
Among Farmhouses, you can find a Manor House or a Hunting Lodge. While they both can be large and rather opulent, the Manor is the only one built as a permanent residence; the Hunting Lodge was, conceptually, a sort of weekend house.
Anyhow, here we are now, with that needed glass of locally grown Cabernet Franc —yes, that half-full glass again— after driving through historic villages, meandering the charming rolling hills of the countryside sprinkled with cows, horses and sheep, sorting through all the buildings we’d seen, redefining our criteria, as the sun set over the vineyard in front of us.
—”Let’s buy a château!” we cried …and we had just found it.
Jeff and I the morning we found our future home outside Couture Sur Loir.