Winter work is underway at the Chateau..Here's how we got started...

Chère amie, cher ami,

“On ne va tirer les plans sur la comète!” 
 
Dust lay thick on the old red and ochre tiles. There was a three-foot hole in the floor where the stove had been. Wire and pipes stuck out of the bare walls. And the only light came from a long neon tube dangling from the ceiling.
 
Monsieur Xavier, encased in a dark blue jacket and a wool bonnet pulled down to his brows, scowled slightly. 
 
“Don’t make plans on the comet!” as the expression has it. The demolition was over; now came the serious part – the “plan d’attaque.”
 
I’d walked over from the Farmhouse to take stock of the situation. Crunching over the frozen grass in the in the winter darkness, I could see a light gleaming out from the Chateau. Monsieur Xavier who is our gardien and a jack of all trades extraordinaire, and his son Cédric were already at work. Cédric is not only a registered electrician, plumber and chauffagiste, he works on retainer at a local ice cream factory. When all is going well chez la glacière, he lends a hand.

In the entrance hall of the Chateau, kitchen cabinets and the entrails of the old dumb waiter were piled together. More cabinets, granite countertops, sinks, a couple of dishwashers and two refrigerators filled the petite salle à manger, the little family dining room next to the kitchen.
 
Monsieur Xavier was waiting with a tape measure and a pencil. This was a time for methodical analysis, not astrology. And we must know whether everything would fit.
 
I’d finally made the decision to renovate the old kitchen in the Chateau. Monsieur Xavier had been doubtful, even reluctant. There were pictures to hang, he reminded me. Mirrors had been ordered for all the bedrooms. The tapissière, the village upholsterer, was waiting for instruction on curtains and armchairs. And what about la petite maison, the cherished little groom’s apartment at the end of the stable block where he has lovingly tinkered for the last eight years!
 
Winter at Courtomer is when we take stock of all the repairs and maintenance that need to be done at the Chateau and in the Farmhouse before the next season begins. We had three months before our first clients, an American group exploring Normandy, would arrive in April. It’s not much time.
 
But there’s a moment in every cook’s life when a kitchen either becomes familiar and beloved despite its shortcomings or is considered hopeless. This kitchen was both completely new and misbegotten when I inherited it in 2008. It had to go. 
 
To take only one example, what cuisiniste would put a dumb waiter between the wall and a double cooktop? The only way to get something in or out of the monte-charge was to reach over hot burners and boiling water. We had soon stopped using the dumb-waiter anyway, since the motor that had been furnished was too small and burned out. Then, there was nowhere to work. Countertops had been sacrificed to the space taken up by two refrigerators, one of them an extra-wide frigo américaine, and a wall of deep storage cabinets. The faucet had been installed too far from the sinks and sprayed water all over the countertop.
 
Insupportable! You might wonder why I put up with it for so long.
 
Experience had tempered my kitchen-improving ardor.
 
When we had moved into our Paris apartment, I impatiently tore out the existing kitchen. It had been put in place by the former owner, an extravagant person whom everyone described as an “artiste-peintre.” As befits an artist, her kitchen was “personnelle,” the agent’s euphemism for useless and impractical. You had to walk around a kitchen peninsula to get from the stove to the sink. The appliances were an odd assortment. As the artist herself pointed out, there was a fish-steamer and a deep-fat fryer for making frîtes.
 
“One loses so much weight!” she said to my husband, patting her flat stomach and pointing out the steamer. 
 
“Not that you have to worry!” she had added with an admiring smirk.
 
“A very pleasant person,” Monsieur told me approvingly. “I think the kitchen is perfectly fine.”
 
Of course, it had to go. Besides being impractical, the kitchen was painted in huge blocks of blue, mustard, avocado green and brick red.
 
I was determined to save money. I hired a Portuguese team recommended by the head lad at the stables where I kept my horse. João and his two brothers were good workers. But part of the arrangement was that I had to supply all the material. I spent my time in the suburbs buying tile and sand, faucets and wire and then driving it all back into town. We went on vacation. They went on vacation…or perhaps it was another job. I finally caught sight of João digging a drainage ditch at the stables. He looked at me sheepishly. The brothers came back to work at the apartment and did some more plumbing. 
 
Meanwhile, I had found a cuisiniste in Paris. La Cuisine Française had exactly the custom-made cabinets I wanted, plus top-of-the-line appliances and granite countertops, a novelty in Paris at the time. They drew up a very pretty and functional kitchen. 
 
Back at home, the children were tired of eating at the huge cardboard box that had held my new refrigerator. Monsieur was exasperated.
 
“That nice lady’s daughter stopped by,” he told me. “I was sitting here near the kitchen door. She dropped something off for you,” he explained, passing me a gas bill. The former owner’s daughter was temporarily staying in our chambre de bonne on the top floor of the building while she finished her year of studies in Paris.
 
“When she came in, she looked around and saw what you’d done. Everything torn out in the kitchen! I guess her happy childhood memories came rushing back. She said, “I just want to cry!”
 
“I told her, “Stay, and I’ll cry with you!””
 
He rattled his paper and went back to the financial news.
 
“This kitchen going to be ready anytime soon?” he asked, looking up quizzically. I muttered something about the three-month delay.

But once the kitchen was finally in, it was my pride and joy. There was a butcher’s block bound in brass strips. Sliding willow baskets for onions and potatoes. Pull-out shelves cleverly concealed by fluted columns. A knife-drawer and drawers for pots and pans. A substantial island with gas and induction hobs and a plancha. The cabinetry’s hand-applied patina was a lovely creamy white, the granite sparkled in hues of golden brown.
 
“So-o British!” my friends exclaimed in admiration, fondling the sculpted angles of the island.
 
We had many happy meals in that kitchen. And it was a painful moment when, a decade later, I realized we must sell the apartment in Paris. We were dividing our time between the United States, the French countryside, and a farm in Argentina; managing an empty apartment in Paris was pas possible.
 
A person in the neighborhood bought the apartment. I met him at the notaire’s office for the promesse, the first stage of a property sale in France.
 
“I’ve shown it to my architect,” he commented airily, while we waited for a document to come through. “We’re tearing everything out!”
 
It was an extreme example of what goes around, comes around. For not only did he intend to tear out and replace the kitchen and two of the new bathrooms, he didn’t like the graceful 19th-century plasterwork or the beautiful carved wooden and glass interior doors. In a fine old Haussmanian building, he wanted a featureless modern apartment.
 
“At least,” I told Monsieur huffily, dabbing my eyes, “I didn’t replace the windows.” They were about to fall apart.
 
A muffled crash brought me back to the present. Monsieur Xavier rushed into the kitchen, where Cédric was dusting himself off. But all was well. It was just a last piece of dumb-waiter housing being knocked into the basement.
 
“We’d better see what we have in storage,” Monsieur Xavier reminded me. We went out the back stairs of the Chateau and walked toward the box stalls in the stable block.

When I first came to the Chateau, I had priced out a new kitchen almost as soon as seeing the existing one. It would have cost as much as my new one in Paris, I found, without the new appliances. Naturally, with roofs to replace and so much more to do on such a large château and its many outbuildings, I forbore.
 
I would never have considered it again…but that both the old kitchens from Paris were out in the box stalls of the old stable block. I had stored the artiste's kitchen, and parts of it are in the Farmhouse now. And when the buyer told me he was going to rip out my beloved kitchen, I had asked him if he would like me to remove it. We lived in the Paris apartment for two more weeks. The day before we left, a crew of Moldavians recommended by a friend took out every piece of my kitchen and two of the bathrooms. They loaded them into a moving van and drove them out to Normandy. Monsieur Xavier supervised their unloading.
 
It has been seven years since we left Paris. There, in one of the box stalls, stood the dismembered pieces of my dear old kitchen. There were the butcher block and the willow baskets. I opened one of the drawers. Why, there was the latte whip!
 
Monsieur Xavier coughed. 
 
He had photographed and taken dimensions of all the éléments. I must make a plan, to show him and his son where everything was to go. Then, they would start the new wiring and plumbing. I set to work.

At the end of the day, I walked back to the farmhouse in the gloam of the late afternoon. The frost had slid away in the sunlight, uncovering the bright green of the grass and leaving it to bend with evening dew. The air was damp and soft. The setting sun, reflected in the Chateau windows and in the waters of the moat, cast its rosy rays against the creamy stone.

"I see that hope springs eternal," said Monsieur when I got back to the Farmhouse. But he offered to paint the walls with a primer coat.

 
    Until next week, chers amis, with warm regards -- et à bientôt au Chateau!
     
                    ELISABETH
 

P.S. Our château and its farmhouse are available to rent for small gatherings and holidays of friends and families. It’s a great place for an intimate wedding as well. We have just a few openings for 2023, and are delighted to be taking bookings for 2024 and 2025. Check out Courtomer at www.chateaudecourtomer.com or write to info@chateaudecourtomer.com.