Notre Petit Château

Bonjour à tous

I hope you have all had a lovely week. My week has been challenging for various reasons, including a battle with Instagram and some family issues. For that reason not much has progressed renovation-wise, although I have done my first kitchen job in between work meetings, clearing off the old shelves above the sink so Max could remove them. Now they are down, the next job is Max’s – filling the many cracks in the wall! I did also finally paint the last in the set of 3 wicker boxes that will act as storage places for socks, etc in our bedroom, and also made the latest batch of marmalade – pink grapefruit and clementine. Hooray!

Rather than rant on about Instagram which is very tempting, I thought you might be interested in some more detail about the house. It is fascinating as a building as clearly it has been added to over the years, for a start we have 3 attics and 3 different types of roof! Whilst researching the history of the petit château, I discovered that there has been a building here since at least 1595. When we bought the house we were told that the oldest part dated from 1794 and the tower end mid-1800s. Part of me suspects that the kitchen end might be older, or that part of an older structure might still exist, built over or around in some way. We have read somewhere that the thickness of walls can give an indication of age. We have walls of various depths, none uniform, some wider one end than the other, many less than straight! The depths range from 70 – 75cm at the older end of the house, both internal and external walls. The tower end walls range from 52cm to 68cm in depth. Built before the time of precision engineering and measurements I guess!

We know that the kitchen end is older and think that perhaps the house was once just 2 storeys high. Some of the internal walls are also very substantial and give the impression that once upon a time the layout may well have been different, perhaps the front door would have given on to a very large hall – the billiard room and salon combined, and the old kitchen (now souillarde) and séjour would also have been one space. The walls between these rooms are partition walls (albeit old) and in the case of the salon have been placed on top of the old hall tiles!

Also fascinating, as I mentioned is the existence of 3 separate attics. The one at the kitchen end has some very old looking beams, older than some of the other beams in there, which made me wonder if parts might be even older than we think. It is connected to another attic that to all intents and purposes had been lost. There was no entrance apart from a small hole in the end of the wall to allow electricity cables to go through. The hole is large enough to climb through but that is it. It has clearly been knocked through – weird! My theory is that when the tower was added and the rooms extended at that end of the house, somehow this attic got blocked off by the new storey. Who knows if I am right but it’s a theory nonetheless. The tower attic is also interesting as some of the roof beams have been cut. It looks as if the roof was at one time lower and beams were cut to allow a doorway into this space. Maybe extensions were added in stages.

We also have 3 different roofs (or rooves – we had a big debate about this word, rooves apparently being very dated as a spelling now!). The kitchen and inner hall area have one roof (clay canal tiles), the séjour and souillarde another (square terracotta tiles), and the remainder is slate at the tower end – again slightly odd but seemingly related to the parts of the building. Maybe a long time ago the house was one room deep and ran along from the kitchen end, then it was extended out. Again all I can do is theorise! We think the slate roof was added when the Attorney General of Paris owned the house as a country residence. It is a very grand and complicated roof, with a main section, a pigeonnier tower, and a terrace roof with two small spires (which we call the witches’ hats). This would have been expensive then (as it was to redo it!), both due to the design and the use of slate, and thus a statement of wealth and status. Our roofers José and Christian said they loved working on the slate roof as it gave them the opportunity to use the full extent of their artisan skills for once as it was a complex rebuild. In some places it required a good deal of ingenuity on their part, as it was much more challenging than their usual roof jobs and very unusual!  

A real source of fascination for me is the huge variety of floors in the house. Some floors were replaced by the previous owner as they were completely rotten. An example of this is the inner hall and kitchen floors, both now tiled as the floorboards had been so rotten that the main stairs was sinking into the ground when he bought the place in the 1990s. The séjour floor has also been replaced but we learnt from the neighbours that the floor had been wood, but was again full of holes! The Directoire bedroom on the first floor above our kitchen has an incredibly old floor, wooden boards, possibly walnut, none of them uniform in width, laid in an interesting pattern. The room next door has a completely different floor, another style at the top of the stairs and then a beautiful parquet floor on the landing between the stairs and the Nun’s room. The parquet floor is highly polished and very smart (albeit in need of some tlc) and a total contrast to some of the more rustic floorboards elsewhere in the house.

There is another strip of really old floor in the room between the Nun’s room and the office. It looks as if it was once a corridor but is now part of a room, or it is all that survived of that floor. Who knows? This room also has the trapdoor to the souillarde – well the opening has been blocked up but the trapdoor left in the floor. We have no idea what that would have been for. The flooring in the tower end is all pretty similar so suggests that it was all laid at the time the tower was added.

We also have various styles of floor tile through the house. The tiles in the entrance hall are obviously quite old and worn suggesting hundreds of years of use. All those feet tramping through the front door. It would appear that they perhaps stretched further than they do now but were replaced in the salon when it became a separate room. This room has black, cream and a sort of mustardy gold colour tiles, very smart in its time I am sure, now quite worn but delightful. Parts of the edging are also different, the bit by the entrance to the hall is black and cream and the remainder black and mustardy gold. Which came first I wonder? Who knows what was in the Billiard room as the floor has long been concreted.

There are so many other odd details that are fascinating, including an arched doorway from the salon to the old bathroom on the ground floor, and 7-8 hidden doors in the house. It would be wonderful to find someone who is good at identifying the age (or ages) of a house, whether by the walls, the construction or the floors. I am sure there must be a date stone somewhere but the exterior is covered in a patchwork of crépis (render). The barns next door were built onto the house in 1850, 1883 and 1892 which seems to tie in with the expansion of the house. Apparently a big barn was a symbol of wealth! What made someone add a balcony on the second floor, a belvedere on the 4^th? So many questions!

As we work our way through the house you can’t help but wonder about those who have lived here before us. The tales this petit château could tell. At least 426 years of life and death, love and laughter, tears and fears. What a lot of generations of people. What happened to the noble family who once lived here, disappearing around the time of the Revolution. One can but guess! How did the Napoleonic officer come to acquire the house, which then passed through many branches of that family but rarely down direct lines. People died or couldn’t inherit, in one case all the children died so it passed to another branch of the family. I still have to visit the local archives, where perhaps I will find out more. We have some old papers to examine but mainly from the mid-1800s onwards, so quite recent history in the scheme of things.

Old houses are really interesting. It is strange sometimes to sit and imagine how many souls have used that room before me. To also imagine what the house must have looked like, how cold it must have been at times, what happened here. Houses evolve through the ages and this house is no exception and no doubt it will continue to evolve as long as it stands. I hope it is enjoying being lived in full-time again, instead of being a holiday home. I hope it approves of the stamp we will put on it, trying to respect its construction, retaining its features but making it more comfortable for us. Clearly room layouts have changed over the years and we will do the same in places. Interconnecting rooms don’t really work for us, unless we want a suite of rooms! (well maybe for us, but not everywhere in the house!). Possibly at times a number of families shared the house, so this worked, otherwise I have no idea what it was like walking through countless rooms to reach the space you wanted.

Hopefully you will follow us on our journey breathing new life into our petit château in the Tarn. I will keep you posted as and when I discover more about its history and inhabitants, or if we uncover anything exciting in our renovations.

Enjoy the week ahead. We took the day off yesterday to go out – a short escape from work and DIY, which is why this post is a ittle late. It is essential for one’s mental health I think to take some time out occasionally! I will tell you all about where we went next week.

A bientôt

Ali xx