Full Tour of our French Chateau (2025)

Hi and welcome to our home which we've been renovating for the last six years. Recently we finished our master suite and we had a lot of requests from people who would like to see an updated tour so we thought that this week we would show you around and share a bit more about our approach to interior design. Come with me. This is our main entrance and the main stairway for the whole of the chateau. When we came here there wasn't much original features left and we really wanted this to have that sort of grand chateau feeling even though this is quite a small chateau in some respects but we still wanted to have a bit of drama but also feel very inviting and welcoming. One of the ideas to bring back some character was to put down this pierre de bourgogne which is a burgundy stone and this is a typical flooring that you would find in 18th century chateaus. We also worked with Benoit Arcante to put in some mouldings which would have originally been here but they had at some point been removed and we chose this really soothing calming green colour which is an actual reference to an 18th century colour but it has that sort of heritage feel but at the same time it feels modern. The choice of this colour was really important because it had to be a colour that was going to work throughout the whole chateau and the other colours and other rooms coming off this would flow from. Then we chose this warm off-white which is called slate lime and we wanted to add that on the woodwork because it has this classic feel and it helped add a bit of continuity in some of the rooms. It doesn't go in every room but it's in quite a lot of them. This is our evening salon. In here we wanted it to feel really cosy somewhere that especially in wintertime we can put the fire on, we can sit by the fire, have a glass of wine, read a book or play some board games. We love this colour because it has a lot of green in the blue so it feels it doesn't feel too cold and it has a nice kind of flow with the green which is outside in the hallway. This room is actually a room where we've furnished it pretty much with everything secondhand because we do love to include things that we pick up in brocantes or charity shops. We even included this rug which was actually already here in the chateau. These chairs for example we picked up for 80 euros from our local charity shop. You might recognise these, we picked them up last week at the professional brocante and I just love that mix and it's quite unexpected sometimes to have things that are a little bit more modern mixed in with this very beautiful period room. This is our guest bathroom, washroom. It's a small space, we've actually built it out of what was the former 18th century back kitchen. So this was a complete blank canvas and I was trying to think how could I make something that was just not a bland boring guest bathroom. So I decided to have some fun in here and get quite creative. So I went very dark on all the woodwork and then I did this kind of wash on the walls that's like a degradate so it gets lighter towards the top and then I painted this mural which was inspired by Villa Olivia, a Roman fresco, but I wanted to add in a little nod to our adoptive homeland of Normandy. So we have the apple trees here and I kept it very tonal so it's very green which you will see is kind of a theme that I chose to incorporate throughout the chateau. It is a running joke that I love green, I'm obsessed with green. I love it, I think it's such a soothing colour and it's a great colour to sort of have as a thread that runs throughout the chateau. So here we have the actual toilet. These are four prints that we picked up in a charity shop actually on our travels last summer in Sweden and I love picking up ceramics or artwork when we go on our travels. I think it's a really great way to embellish and decorate your home but also you have those lovely memories. It does feel like we've finally found our style after six years. What we learnt in six years and making many mistakes is that emulating a style, copying a style that you like is a really bad starting point for when you come to decorating your home. This might sound counterproductive because when you look at social media, when you look at magazines, everyone is trying to tell you how to emulate, how to get the look and what's in fashion right now. But if you really want to feel happy in your home, if you want to have that personal connection then you just need to change your approach to how you decorate. Don't get me wrong, I love looking through beautiful homes and interior magazines and looking at how beautiful other people's homes are but I have now stopped using that as a starting point for when I come to decorating. And now I'm going to show you a room that we are currently working on. This is our new project room. This is going to be our family living room and you can see that Ziggy's already feeling quite comfortable in here. When it came to decorating this room I didn't have a certain style in mind. Nowadays I have a method which has completely changed the way that I approach interior design. It's a simple shift in perspective. It's like a small trick or tool that anybody can use in their home. Instead of asking myself how can I make this room look a certain way, I ask myself what does this room need to do for me? How do I want to feel in this room and how do I want to use it? I am no longer working for the room, the room has to work for me. So when it came to designing this living room, this family living room, the main thing that we needed was to have comfortable seating. So we actually had this sofa in our previous home but when we first moved here I remember we tried it in this room and straight away we said no it doesn't suit the sort of chateau style that we thought that we needed to emulate. And when we bought this sofa back in we realized that it perfectly fulfilled our needs for this room. So by not worrying about a specific style and instead really focusing on what do we need this room to do for us, we even figured out that we could use this old sofa that we already had. I'm not a trained interior designer, I actually have a background in fashion and textile print design. I studied in London and then I moved on to spend 10 years working in luxury fashion in Paris. But in the last six years Philip and I have been spending a lot of time renovating this chateau and we have had to learn a lot of new skills. We had quite a small budget and so we have had to figure out how to create a home which is beautiful and meaningful without having to spend a lot of money. If Anna is guiding you through the house it doesn't mean that I wasn't involved in the design process, quite the contrary. It's just I'm more humble, more discreet, silently operating in the background. Just like Squarespace when it comes to designing a web page. An all-in-one platform to create an outstanding web presence which also happens to be this week's ad. And just like with me here at the chateau, nobody will know that your webpage was created with Squarespace. Apart from those who can tell of course from the professional design and the impeccable taste which perfectly fits your company or your personal design language. And you don't need any programming skills to achieve this. 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I think it was 25 euros in a charity shop and it is covered in paint because we like to do sort of arty crafty things in here. So we really love to mix up our style of furniture and this is for example an Italian lamp from the 70s or 80s that Philip loved and he found this on auction. We find quite a bit of things on auction actually. So this side table is from Denmark. These are 60s Italian chairs. They do need reupholstering. That's another project that I'm going to be working on. So we like to mix our styles. So there's nothing that has, it's not a very prescribed style, it's just pieces that we fall in love with and we love to mix together. This is the heart of our home, our kitchen, where we spend a lot of time as a family. We love to cook, we love to have our friends over, we love to entertain here and we went for a really warm neutral color in here which is a bit of a shift because we have a lot of color in the rest of the chateau but we felt that we wanted to create a really calming space. It is that. It's a warm neutral so it still feels cozy. We have this beautiful big high ceilings and big windows so it's very light. I love to bring in a touch of green of course. So we have the green island, we have lots of green plants because I love that little touch of green which is a nod to the green that we've got in other rooms of the chateau. I think the style that we have created in here and in the chateau in general has kind of evolved naturally because we both have our different tastes and things that we love. For example this farmhouse kitchen I definitely wanted that because it has a little nod to the English countryside but also French countryside style. Philip chose these tonnette chairs and he loves these because it reminds him of Vienna where he studied for five years and you will find these in a lot of Viennese cafes. So I love how this kitchen turned out aesthetically but actually when we began designing it the main thing that we started with was how it was going to work functionally as a cooking space. So Philip is the big chef in the kitchen and he loves to cook a lot so he decided that he wanted to make this best possibly for a good kind of flow for cooking. So we have over here all of the food storage and then we have the fridge. From there you come over with your food and you prep, you wash it, you can chop here and then you move over here to cooking and then you move back over here to serving and then over for here for the washing up and the dishwasher. So the idea was to reduce as much as possible the movement through the kitchen space and make it as efficient as possible. Here we have my hand-painted tiles that I created especially for this kitchen. That's because not only did we want this space to be functional but we also wanted it to feel really homely and I love to bring in something that is handmade into each room. I think that personal connection to having made something that you put into your rooms it really helps to make those rooms more meaningful and for you to enjoy spending your time in them. Recently I had somebody reach out to us and they were in the process of redecorating their kitchen they admired what we'd done here and they asked if we could give them some advice and it got me thinking how can I help people who are completely stuck and don't know where to start and it certainly isn't by telling them which paint colours I used or which company to buy your fixtures and fittings from. It's about helping people to ask the right questions so that they can find their own style. I'm bringing you upstairs to our first floor where we have all of our bedrooms. Through here is our green room this is our guest room for when we have friends and family coming to stay. It's got these incredible 18th century original panelling here which we really wanted to make a feature of and we wanted this room as it's not an everyday bedroom we wanted it to feel really special for when people come to stay here and for them to get that wow chateau feeling. In order to give this room a bit of a romantic and bold feeling I created this lino printed wallpaper so if you've been following us you will know that I have been making these for well ever since we started renovating the chateau. Two years ago I created an online course where I taught people how to make their own lino printed wallpaper and this was the beginning for me of teaching people how to make a more personal home. I had so many great students and honestly I really enjoyed the experience. Up until about one month ago we were living upstairs on the second floor but we decided one month ago to finally move down as a family and when we did that video where we moved down I shared something quite personal which was that for quite a long time we hadn't really felt at home in the chateau. The reason why we didn't feel at home here was because this whole floor was completely empty and every time we walked through it just felt like very strange and that all changed when we decided to renovate the master suite and also redecorate the kids rooms which I'm going to show you now. This is Ella's bedroom, it was a former guest room and I really love this blue and yellow colour scheme that we have in here but it did feel quite serious for a six-year-old girl so we decided to sort of reappropriate it for Ella and bring in some fun a bit of colour so we added in her bed, we brought in some colour with the carpet. It's so nice to see the girls enjoying their bedrooms and playing in them, they're filled with joy and I just think that now we are living in these rooms and it's had such a big impact on how we feel in our own home so I think the more you set your home up to be a really positive nurturing space the better you feel. It definitely wasn't the feeling that we had this time last year and what about you? Do you know the feeling of not feeling connected to your homes and do you think it has an impact on your well-being and your happiness? Through here is our new master suite and this is, well, my new favourite part of the chateau. The complexity with this space was that we have three rooms that are connected, it wasn't just one renovation but three renovations at the same time so we really had to think about how we wanted to use each space, also consider that they flow and make sure that the colour schemes work together. This is our dressing room, the main function obviously of a dressing room is storage and for clothes so we had these cupboards built in, that has been a life changer because before this we had like one cupboard and a chair which had a pile of clothes like up this high. I went for this really warm aquamarine green blue here, some people will say it's blue, some people say it's green, it's kind of a mix you know, I wanted it to feel like a really lovely space to come in and get dressed. I've got my wallpaper in here which I also think is quite a sort of subtle wallpaper because it's tonal, it's not too in your face, it sort of sits back into the background and we have a great view out onto our beautiful back garden. Please ignore the kids trampoline in the middle of the garden, a bit of an eyesore but they love it, it keeps them busy. So you will see that I also brought in this rust colour which we have also in the master bedroom and a little touch of it also in the bathroom so that was kind of the common thread, I wanted this colour that kind of linked the three spaces together. Well I think it feels very posh, it feels like we're in a nice hotel with a very posh bathroom and I almost want to spend all my time in here to be honest. We have windows that go out onto our coach house which is a beautiful building and yeah there's no other windows that are in that direction so it's lovely to have this view out onto that whilst we're kind of getting ready and this is a great makeup space, I have great light here. So the colour in here we went for a very warm neutral colour, it works really well with the aquamarine next door and then through to the dark blue in our bedroom and one of my favourite features is this checkerboard black and white marble and granite floor. These rooms were very empty, they didn't have any kind of character in them when we started so we really had to bring the charm and character back so we added again panelling, we had this mirror which was made to measure and then we've had our amazing vanity that our carpenter Benoit built and then we painstakingly stained and then we had the bespoke marble added and made to measure for that and I think that's that is a bit of a feature in this room alongside our cast iron bath which we saw second hand, restored it, we love to do that, it's always a great way of you know keeping the budget down but then you get a really stunning bath at the end of it and then I love that we've just added in bits of art that we picked up in markets or the lights. These are Murano lights that we sourced on auction, this is a little painting that was by a friend of my Nana's so we have lots of meaningful pieces in this room that we have like a personal connection to and I think that's why we feel really good in this space. Lastly are my blinds which give me so much joy because I obviously hand printed them myself. I thought that it was super complicated and I actually figured out that it's not that difficult and now I'm really inspired to go make blinds for the rest of the chateau. Through here is our master bedroom, this is yeah such a lovely place to wake up in the morning and go to sleep, it's very restful, like a real cocooning cosy bedroom especially because we've gone for this deep blue colour but it doesn't feel cold, it's really like being in our own little cocoon up here, it's super super cosy and we have gone for some very personal details like this hand printed bed that I upholstered and I said that we yeah we brought in that rust colour that we've seen in the blinds in the bathroom but also on the ottoman in the dressing room so there's that kind of colour that works throughout and I think it works quite nicely with the blue and again with the rug when we wake up we have an amazing view out onto the village church onto our garden especially at this time of year it's such a nice thing to wake up there's so much greenery around. Since finishing the renovation of this master suite it has made such a huge difference to how we feel about living here at the chateau, it can't be overstated how important it is to feel connected to the space that you live in and the reason why we feel so well in these rooms is because of our new approach to decorating. Somehow I wish that six years ago we had figured that out because it would have saved us a lot of time and money which is exactly why I created a new course which I call Soulful Home to show that everyone can use this method to decorate their home in a beautiful personal and meaningful way. I created a six-part video series where I explain exactly how my method works and the content of my upcoming course. In the next video of this mini-series I'm going to be sharing exactly how to implement my soulful home method in your homes. I'm not going to be posting that video on our YouTube channel because it might not be for everybody so if you want to make sure that you don't miss out on that video if you're interested in learning more about my course then you can sign up to my waitlist. I'll put the link down here in the description of the video make sure that you sign up so that you don't miss out. I'm going to be sharing lots of tips lots of tricks and hopefully it will be really interesting and informative. Like with my last course the spaces available are limited and that is so that I can ensure that I can give really good feedback and support to everybody who's partaking on the course. So signing up to the waitlist now will also help you to secure a spot. I hope you enjoyed this tour and if you have any questions about the course or about our home don't hesitate to leave us a comment down below.