
Through hidden doors and corridors
Hello again
I hope you are all well? I can’t believe it is December. What a year and how quickly it has gone. Christmas is around the corner – a little different this year. I am sad that we won’t be seeing family and neither Alex, my younger son, nor my mother will be coming over this year. A difficult time for everyone but sensible to be cautious during the festive season.
This has not been our most positive week. I’m an eternal optimist but sometimes….! Don’t get me wrong, we love it here but some weeks we look at the mountain of jobs to do, the impact the pandemic has had on our work and how things will be after 31st December and need a large glass of wine (or two)! We are still trying to sort out paperwork to register for our Withdrawal Agreement residency papers. Brexit is having such a huge impact on so many. However in spite of the challenges, which we did expect (more or less), we are so glad to have made the move. Sometimes we just have to remind ourselves! It doesn’t help that it has been very cold this week and the house seems to have absorbed the cold! My thermals have never had so much use! It is a good motivator to keep busy and also stop for a hot coffee and a chocolatine every now and again! It must be about time to start making mulled wine too!

A couple of weeks ago I started to take you on a tour of our lovely house, to give you an idea of this project. Well here we are, back again. This time we are on the first floor – our largest floor (approx. 200sqm) and like the ground floor a warren of rooms leading off other rooms! When we first came to visit we kept getting lost and completely losing our bearings.
Before we set off on our ‘round the petit château’ tour, I thought you might be interested in some of the things I have found out this week about former inhabitants of the house. I discovered details of a family who lived here in the mid-1500s – probably not this actual house but on this site! Raymond D’Agens was born around 1559 and appears to have been the illegitimate son of Antoine D’Agens, seigneur (Lord) de Loupiac in the Aveyron. The scandal! Raymond married in 1595 and settled here, seemingly having inherited the land or money or the house (if it existed) from his maternal grandmother’s family – a branch of the Lautrec family. One of his sons was living here in 1673, then we jump to the 1800s. I will have to see if I can have access to the Tarn Archives to find out more. Fascinating though to see the name of the house in records so far back. I am also going to look through the registers at the Mairie in the village to see if there are any clues. Their records date back to the late 1700s, after the revolution.
Anyway history update over, off we go on our tour:
Le premier étage (The first floor)

Let’s start at the tower end this time. You can get to the first floor either by the tower staircase which is off the Billiard room, or from the garden! The tower is built into a slope so we have access at different levels. The door from the garden takes you into a lovely south facing landing. This landing has 2 hidden doors, one of which leads into the toilet, which we plan to turn into a tiny secret library. We will use this landing as the guest sitting room in time and love the hidden doors and big double floor-to-ceiling windows facing south with a Juliet balcony.
The tower end of this floor has a number of hidden doors. They look like a continuation of the wall with panelling or skirting boards so they blend into their surroundings. If they didn’t have door handles you wouldn’t know the door was there. I wonder why there are so many of these – perhaps the style of the time?

Going past the staircase which continues up to the second floor, attic and pigeonnier, off the landing is the room we currently use as an office with fabulous double doors into the Master suite. I have always wanted double doors and can just imagine making a grand entrance through them! Apparently this room was the office of the Maître (Master of the house) in the mid-1800s (perhaps the Attorney General?) and used to have enormous oak bookcases either side of the balcony doors – now sadly long gone. The lovely balcony, albeit in need of repairs and paint, offers views over the fields to the village. The room is enormous (6m by 6m), and in the winter really cold! This might account for the huge fireplace with a magnificent wood mantlepiece and pillars to the side and above. It is quite spectacular and must have given off a lot of heat when working. We don’t know if the chimney is safe so it remains unused. I am sure the whole ground floor of our last house would probably have fitted into this room (well maybe not quite but you get the idea!)

Two shelving alcoves mark the spots where doors used to be that led from a waiting room (now two other rooms) into this room when it was an office apparently. There is also a lovely ensuite bathroom, with two hidden door entrances, one from the bedroom and one from the landing. This is our smartest bathroom but was once a child’s bedroom. It has dual aspect double doors, facing east with a balcony and south with another Juliet balcony.
Back through our office and through another hidden door, we find ourselves in a room which is surrounded on all sides, a real corridor of a room, currently painted lilac and pale green! This is where the trap door is and where you can see evidence of a former dividing wall. One of the old doorways to the Master room is here and the other in the next room, so I suspect much of this room and the next were one room once. Who knows? Anyway we plan to turn it into two bathrooms eventually, one for the office which will become a bedroom and the other for the next bedroom, known as the Nun’s room! No idea why!
The Nun’s room is the smallest bedroom but still spacious with a pretty fireplace and a view across the fields. The walls of this room are for some reason very roughly plastered so we have a bit of work to do. It was part of the waiting area for the Master’s office, and you can still see the outline of the other doorway.

Walking through this room, we find another landing with a beautiful parquet floor. Off this landing are two bathrooms, one a toilet and one a shower room, added in the last 20 years. We love the parquet floor and would like to restore it, so we plan to take these bathrooms out and reinstate the landing with windows over the garden.

From here we find ourselves at the top of the main staircase and going into the final two rooms on this floor. Again these lead into each other, currently known collectively as the Directoire suite – possibly due to the style of the beautiful mouldings over the fireplace in the second room. (Directoire was a style of decorative arts between 1795 and 1803, known for its use of more simple lines). The first of these two rooms has a large fireplace, not useable as the chimney has been taken out. Bizarrely there is no evidence of a fireplace in the room below, so we suspect this was removed along with the chimney. There are the remnants of a fireplace in the attic above it strangely – who knows why? There is also access from this room to one of the attics.
The second room has a beautiful floor – we think it is walnut, almost certainly original, very worn and uneven, definitely the oldest in the house. It has a hole in it which always makes me a bit nervous in case a mouse or a member of Sid the spider’s family pops out! (see earlier post for details about Sid). It will be a challenge to repair this floor. This room also has one of those lovely old latches on the communicating door. Once upon a time the flow of the house continued through this room to the north end of the house. This is now blocked off and belongs to our neighbours, an alcove is all that is left to mark this. The plan is to install a bathroom in part of the first room and make these two rooms one of our guest rooms. The second room is dual aspect with windows to the east and double balcony doors to the west, leading onto a small terrace at the top of those amazing concrete stairs we talked about a few weeks ago. Quite grand really and stunning light when the shutters are open.
Voilà the first floor. A few jobs to do! We have taken some time to plan in order to try and get the flow right. It is difficult to work out the best configuration when rooms lead into each other. We are going to have to stop the through-flow and use both staircases equally. I am excited to share our progress with you as we go. Colour schemes for the bedrooms keep changing. I have masses of fabric to use – I just need to choose which one where! One item I want to incorporate into one of the rooms is this folding screen that I made some time back – I love the fabric, a remnant from an upholsterer friend.

The first B&B rooms will be the Directoire and Nun’s rooms. We will probably change the Nun’s room to another name. As the room looks out to the east and amazing sunrises, maybe this should be our inspiration. As you can see we will be busy for some time to come!
This week I have also been painting furniture to give it a new lease of life. I love finding old things that can be upcycled and rejuvenated, and seem to be constantly acquiring bits and pieces from vide-maisons (the French equivalent of a yard sale). I will be sharing some of these projects in the coming weeks, including doing up a beautiful old sofa and marble-topped washstand.
In other news, the kittens continue to grow and explore the house and love the woodburners, including sleeping behind one of them. Nerve wracking the first time but they seem to know their limits!

Have a lovely week everyone. Thank you for reading this. I would love to know if you are enjoying the blog?
A bientôt
Ali xx


3 Comments
Teresa
Hi Alison, really enjoying reading this, especially as we have been there I’m trying to remember things from tHe photos you post. The place inside looks more done up than I remember, so it looks as though you are making steady progress! Xxx
Susi
Alison, I can’t believe that I am months behind but I am so enjoying your blogs. Don’t allow yourselves to feel downcast by the scale of what you have to do, I’m living my dreams through you! I would so love to be there doing what you are but would fall at the first hurdle as I have no language skills. The house is not only beautiful but fascinating too and I’m really interested to hear the bits of history that you’re piecing together. Keep going, it’s like walking up a steep hill – you only feel the benefit when you look back and see how far you’ve come. x
Ali
Thank you Susi. I am so glad you are enjoying it. More history to come soon. Hope you can come and visit. x