Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Restoration of the Château de Gudanes





From Vogue:
To be the keepers of a grand French château is a thing of dreams, though few will truly live it, and even fewer have the vision and wherewithal to toil to make this dream a reality. Enter Karina and Craig Waters, an Australian couple who in 2013 purchased what amounted to an eighteenth-century neoclassical ruin—albeit a Class 1 Historical Monument ruin—in the village of Château-Verdun in the South of France. The property, Château de Gudanes, had once belonged to Louis Gaspard de Sales, the Marquis de Gudanes, who commissioned Ange-Jacques Gabriel (the Parisian architect behind Versailles’s Petit Trianon and Place de la Concorde) to create the palatial home. And though it survived the French Revolution, it eventually fell into disrepair. “When we first visited the Château back in 2011, we could only gain access to some of the front rooms. The roof, walls, and floors had fallen in and the water damage had prevented entry into most of the rooms. Green mold covered the walls like wallpaper and stinging knee-high weeds carpeted stone floors,” recalls Karina. “Following the ‘consolidation phase’ after which we could safely explore the rooms, people returned to the Château. Not just from the local villages, but from around the world.” (Read more.)
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1 comment:

julygirl said...

Had to be a labor of love because you know what a money pit it must have been!