Do you know how sexy plumbing is?” asks Dick Strawbridge. “It’s not! But it’s so, so important,” he laughs. Actually, corrects his wife, Angel, “our thermal store is a sexy thing, it’s like the London Underground, but in copper. It’s really quite incredible.”
The Strawbridges and their bubbly banter need little introduction. Their smash-hit show, Escape to the Château, which has aired on Channel 4 for the past six years, has seen millions of viewers tune in to follow the couple as they set about restoring the 150-year-old Château de la Motte-Husson to its former glory.
With their children Arthur and Dorothy along for the ride, the couple rolled up their sleeves to renovate every inch of the property themselves. The château has six floors, 45 rooms (“ish”, they laugh, “it depends how you define ‘room’,”), an orangery, a barn, a pig shed, a walled garden, a “lavoire-du-château”, a moat and 12 acres of woodland, its scale accounting for eight series. Together with the couple’s easy way in front of the cameras, it is the ultimate feelgood TV.
The forthcoming ninth series will be their last and while headlines ensued that the show had been cancelled by Channel 4 when they made the announcement earlier this month, the gossip couldn’t be further from the truth.
“You know what, we wanted to go out on a high,” smiles Angel. “Rather than someone asking us to stop!” chimes Dick, and the pair promptly collapsing into laughter. “There’s still so much to do in the house, we could probably go on for a few more years, but every year we’ve said to each other, does it feel right to do another series? Because it’s not a format as such, it’s our family life. With Arthur being 10 in January and Dorothy being nine next year, it was a natural time to stop.” Instead, the pair are turning their attention to uncovering France’s artisanal secrets for a new show set to air in 2023.
Over the course of their original programme so far, they have pooled all their resources to transform their home, with former British army colonel and engineer-turned TV presenter Dick, 63, tackling the structural and building work and The Vintage Patisserie founder and Vintage Tea Party author Angel, 44, applying her creative vision to its decoration. The result is an eclectic mix of cool Britannia and French curiosities wrapped up with retro charm.
“There’s a lot of fantasy, but there are also moments of it being regal with my love of old royal memorabilia, which comes from my vintage tea party years,” she says. “We’re very proud to be British and it’s scattered everywhere, mixed with areas of French history.”
When its former Italian aristocratic owners, the Baglioni family, left the château, they took “what they considered to be of value”, says Angel, “but what they believed not to be treasure has been treasure to us. We found daybeds, trunks, records, recently a train set – we’re still finding bits all over the place.”
The couple famously take pride in reusing and restoring practically everything. “The mindset of looking after old things rather than buying new is so important,” says Dick, who, when not masterminding the schematics of the house, makes furniture. “We’ve got a quiet sustainability message going on, from the food we grow in the walled garden to everything we keep and restore, we always do our best to go to our store of things before we spend – which might sound ridiculous given that we live in a château, but it’s our ethos.”
One of the most famous pieces of inheritance has been samples of vintage wallpaper that Angel found perfectly preserved and turned into the wallpaper for their turret library. So many people asked where they could buy it, it formed the foundation for her homewares collection, now into its third year.
And to think it almost never was. Having met in 2010, the couple started looking for a home in Morocco before finding that everything was out of their price range. It was on a Christmas holiday together in a simple rental near Carcassonne later that year that they were seduced by “the simple life” and the €10,000 house prices in the area, and refocused their search. Initially, they were set on a small house just like the one they stayed in. “We’d go off to France have a little place, have no mortgage, have no cares and get on with life… then Angel got on the internet,” says Dick.
“It totally didn’t help we’d just watched A Good Year with Russell Crowe and, of course, I was completely sold,” laughs Angel. “One evening, while we were still there, I started searching in the lower price brackets, then a couple higher, and by the end of the evening I was looking at £6m chateaux! I think that’s when I said, ‘Let’s reach for the stars and see what we get.’”
Throwing their net wide from the Pyrenees to the Pas-de-Calais, it took nightly searches, 10 trips, four years, and “lots of nearlies” before they were alerted by an estate agent they’d previously engaged that “a petit château” in the French market town of Martigné-sur-Mayenne was about to come on the market. As fate would have it, they were in France at the time and had already decided to film their journey “as a TV adventure”, so had brought a cameraman friend with them. “I knew it was the one as soon as we saw it,” says Angel, who “practically didn’t wait until the front door was open before you putting an offer in,” Dick divulges.
They bought it for €345,000 in October 2014, plus an extra €50,000 for a plot of land in the walled garden that was essential to their privacy. The following January they packed up the car in east London and moved to France with the Channel 4 cameras in tow.
With the château empty for 40 years, Dick spent the first month sorting “the grimy stuff that made it unsafe for the kids”. Surviving on a basic heating system that lasted for three hours at a time, they had just one plug socket (“We had quite a few extension leads coming off that”) and a mass awakening of flies. But as the weather warmed up, so too did their grand plan start to take shape.
By the following summer, the pair held their own wedding at the château, paving the way for a lucrative business that benefits from Angel’s vintage-hospitality past and now sees them host up to 15 ceremonies a year and the six eight-bedroom suites they have renovated fully occupied. Catering eight courses for 80 people at a time requires Angel’s famous collection of china and glassware to be polished up and presented in all its glory. “Oh my God, I’ll sit down and count it all one day, but I’m going to guess and say there are maybe 10,000 items, she admits.”
Nearly a decade down the line, the pair are still brimming with the same enthusiasm that has made them such welcome guests in people’s living rooms. “It may not be everybody’s dream, but I think a lot of people can relate to a family going and having an adventure,” says Dick. “We still smile when we come down the driveway, so it must still be working for us after all these years of graft.”
Their advice to anyone wanting to do the same? “Do it,” he says. “People make excuses, but taking the first step and going all in is what you have to do. That might not mean buying a château, but having an adventure. Life is all about that: you only get one pass. It’s like the Chinese proverb: ‘A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.’”
The new series of Escape to the Château starts on 30 October at 8pm on Channel 4 (thechateau.tv)
