Real Life: From Africa to a French Chateau

While living in London and Africa, Fiona and Miles Warner decided to create a château home, and later business, in France, they tell Anna Tobin…

The Warner family had been dividing their time between London and Africa, where Fiona and her husband Miles had been working, but it was on a holiday to Aquitaine that they began to think about putting down deeper roots in France.

“Back in 2001, while we were here visiting Miles’s parents who had bought a house close by in the 1970s, we viewed Château de Pécile for the first time,” explains Fiona. Tucked away in the hillside village of Bazens, the château was in a bad way. There were acacia saplings growing out of the floorboards in the main salon, shutters precariously hanging from the windows and a single cold-water tap. Yet it wasn’t uninhabited. The owner lived in one room, heated with a wood-burning stove. And she had a fascinating story to tell.

“Monique Fillerin had been a teenage resistance fighter in the Second World War, working with her parents on the Pat O’Leary line, which helped Allied soldiers shot down over France. Monique maintained lifelong friendships with everyone she’d helped and when she realised we were English, she really warmed to us and began showing us all the treasures she’d kept around the house,” says Fiona.

“This included letters from Airey Neave and other airmen Monique had helped evade capture and return to freedom.”

The château had been on the market for a decade, but the owner was looking for a buyer who would love the property as much as she did and she was adamant that it must not be bought to be turned into a faceless hotel, but remain a home. When the Warners passed her scrutiny, she finally agreed to sell to them in 2002.

“The purchase was very straightforward,” says Fiona. “Once we’d agreed the price, we found a local notaire who worked with the vendors’ notaire and we completed within about six months.”

While Fiona and Miles were delighted at the prospect of turning the derelict property into a welcoming family home, their children – Hugo, who was 12 at the time, Alexander, 11, Cosmo, nine, and Maximo three – were a little more sceptical about living somewhere where trees had literally taken root.

Luckily for them, they didn’t have to take up residence straight away. The Warners moved into a small house up the road from the château, which they’d bought a while back as a holiday home. The children also swapped their English school for the local village school, which was a little more of a culture shock, until they discovered that they and the local kids shared a passion for a particular sport. “This area is famous for rugby,” says Fiona. “The kids got very involved in the Agen rugby club and that really helped us to integrate with the community and make friends. Suddenly I was the mother of four boys who played for the rugby team and we became honourary locals.”

Miles ‘commuted’ to and from his job as a petro-chemical engineer working across North Africa, while Fiona decided to take a break from expat life in Africa and concentrate on renovating the house and settling the children.

Having read French at university, the language wasn’t a barrier to Fiona and she first set about searching for an architect to help restore the property and make the layout of the house better suited to a young family. She wanted someone very local, who would be excited about the project.

“We went with François de la Serre, who has become quite well known for several prestigious projects across France, including an Olympic stadium, but he was newly qualified at the time. This was his first residential project and he put his heart and soul into proving his worth,” says Fiona.

“François spent time with all of us asking how we would each use the house. He asked the children whether they liked spending more time outside or more time inside watching TV and playing computer games, and he tried to get a steer on us and our interests. As we are all very outdoorsy, he made the TV room quite small, whereas the communal eating and socialising spaces are larger.”

As they weren’t changing the footprint of the property, there was no need to obtain planning permission for the restoration, and Fiona began searching for tradespeople soon after the plans were finalised.
“I was keen to use only local builders and artisans for the work,” says Fiona. “Not only are they used to working with the materials and restoring the architectural features native to the area, using them was also another way of helping us to become part of the local community. And also, it means a lot to Miles and I to discover people and help them grow; in part, that’s what we have spent 30 years doing across Africa.

“Local craftsman Dalla Barba made the staircase. He drove all the way from Aquitaine to Burgundy to inspect the huge ash tree trunk that he wanted to use for the six-metre banisters and a year later he arrived with the staircase. “His 18-month delivery estimate sounded like a long time, but it was more than worth the wait,” Fiona says.

The day he installed the staircase, all the other workmen downed tools and applauded his workmanship and we all had an apéritif to celebrate, there was a real feeling of team spirit.”

Fiona is also a big fan of recycling and upcycling where possible. Some of the kitchen units, for example, were made using the walnut wood from a buffet sideboard in what was the original dining room.

“We saved this wood from the bonfire and had a local furniture maker, Jean François Laporte from Nerac, transform the original 18th- century walnut sideboard into a beautiful kitchen,” says Fiona. “Most of the furniture here has been sourced locally from brocantes or slowly shipped here from the homes we had in Cairo and Dakar.”

The first phase of the project saw two-thirds of the property restored, and the family lived there full time until 2006, after which Fiona and Miles returned to work in Cairo and the boys to schools in England, and the house became a place they spent their holidays. It was the onset of Covid-19, that led Fiona and Miles to return to the house full time to restore and furnish the remaining rooms and work on the garden.

With all four boys having flown the nest, the large family home felt empty, so Fiona was keen to open it up to let others enjoy its charms. She decided to revisit a concept she had developed from observing women’s empowerment projects.

“Whether it was working with a group of women in forest clearings or the Sahara Desert, I learned that people everywhere benefit from getting together and sharing their wisdom. I wanted to recreate that experience here, so I’ve spent the past three years developing creative getaways.

“We now open up the house for small groups to come here to relax, create and learn. Guests from all over the world gather here with their teacher for embroidery or botanical illustration, for example. They love the secluded luxurious home-from-home experience. We’ve welcomed zen hen parties, school reunions, cyclists and wine connoisseurs. I really enjoy showing them around the markets, brocantes and local sights such as the Latour Marliac Waterlily Nursery where Claude Monet bought his plants.

“It is lovely to watch our guests wind down from their busy lives. They can do yoga in our orangerie in the morning, then spend a day in the barn studio, painting or sewing. Organic homemade meals are served on the large terrace overlooking the pool built in the ruins of a 15th-century building near the main house.

“So far the marketing has only been by word of mouth recommendation and I can happily say the groups keep returning for more!”

Find out more about visiting Château de Pécile.

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