Group Chât

FIVE YEARS AFTER DESERTING HIS POST in the British Army, Billy Petherick spent 2014 raiding forty-odd churches across Northern France. Entering during normal operating hours, he used a crowbar to pry open locked chests holding chalices, tabernacle keys, and other religious artifacts. His French girlfriend, Gwendoline Mouchel, heiress to the Lesaffre yeast fortune, remained in their Porsche, operating as a lookout or, as she later told the court, playing on her phone and writing her marketing dissertation. Her partner, she later offered by way of explanation, “did not have a high opinion of the Church.”

Two years after the heist, Billy and Gwen spent €1,050,000 on Château de la Basmaignée, a neo-Gothic hunting lodge without electricity or running water in the rural region of Pays de La Loire. The Russian couple who previously owned the estate—complete with a private chapel, six cottages, and sixty acres of parkland—had left it in near ruin. But between Billy’s limited building experience, the artistic vision of his brother Michael, a network of British tradie expats, and Gwen’s fabulous wealth, they believed they had the raw materials at their disposal to resurrect the crumbling manor. Their hard work paid off when the popular British Channel 4 reality TV show Escape to the Château: DIY caught wind of the renovation and, in 2018, featured their project in a few episodes.

Eventually footage of Billy redoing the mortar on his chimney arrived at the desk of Captain Daniel Lawlor. On his return to the UK, he was promptly arrested, charged with desertion, and dismissed from the Household Cavalry. He managed to stave off jail time until 2024, when French authorities found some of the stolen pieces on eBay, leading the Rennes public prosecutor’s office to trace about eighty artifacts to Billy. After paying a €25,000 fine—and after Billy spent three months behind bars—he and Gwen continued, and do continue, to renovate their château and recently acquired convent, filming their progress for the family’s small fiefdom of YouTube channels (Billy’s The Pethericks, Michael’s Doing It Ourselves, and the third Petherick sibling’s Sadie in France). You, along with millions of others, may find yourself watching Billy in his beautiful château with his beautiful chatelaine, and you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?

For an answer we need to return to 2014. As Billy Petherick was emptying the tabernacles of Brittany and Anjou, thousands of miles away, Chip and Joanna Gaines debuted in the first season of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. Succeeding David Koresh and his harem, they soon became the king and queen of Waco, Texas, carving their postindustrial fantasy into the remains of an old cattle town and writing the playbook for couples’ renotainment in the process. Chip and Jo transformed cottonseed oil silos into lifestyle compounds, replaced orange peel walls with whitewashed shiplap, and brought farm sinks into new builds on the exurban frontier. When their audience grew bored with farmhouse chic, they pivoted to more refined design references—think $2,000 “art deco” marble coffee tables, recreation rooms with custom cherry seating, and ’60s firepits better suited to Aspen than Waco. But the show’s success was not a function of Jo’s style or Chip’s savvy as a general contractor (although both were required for the bit to work). Fixer Upper was a perfectly calibrated balance of scripted and candid, aspirational and approachable, designed and lived in. Since the show’s final season in 2017, the Gaineses’ media footprint has only expanded. In 2022, Joanna published a best-selling memoir titled The Stories We Tell: Every Piece of Your Story Matters, and last fall, Mattel honored the designer with a Barbie in her image and a Dream House complete with bespoke plastic accessories for “endless storytelling possibilities.” Meanwhile, the duo’s lifestyle brand Magnolia has sprouted a bakery, magazine, cable network, and Target home décor line. Chip and Jo’s success hinges on a keen understanding of the audience’s expectations, and they continuously tweak their content in response. During a bull market, they renovate mansions and lake houses, and when the economy runs cool, they turn to small-scale projects like those featured on Jo’s solo effort Mini Reni and ventures like Back to the Frontier, where real families cosplay as 1880s homesteaders.

From the cul-de-sacs of Orange County to roadside motels in Costa Rica to the “passive homes” of Fliplanthropy, the fictitious reno show on Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, today’s successful home makeover programs emulate the Waco model: Partners in life and business share a dream of making a small parcel better than it was yesterday, in hopes that it inspires their neighbors, transforms a community, and makes them rich in the process. If Fixer Upper appealed to suburban fantasies of a more bucolic, rooted America, Escape to the Château, which premiered in 2016, sold middle-class Brits on a life of genteel expatriation in rural France.^* In the Europe they voted to leave lay a world of faded manorial splendor waiting to be improved by industrious landowners from the North. For nine seasons, the show followed Lieutenant Colonel Dick Strawbridge and his partner, erstwhile party planner Angel Adoree, as they transformed a forty-five-bedroom neo-Renaissance castle (again in Pays de la Loire) into a wedding venue and glamping destination.

A self-styled “telly tart,” Strawbridge is a seasoned reality TV professional, having appeared in over thirty episodes of Scrapheap Challenge and Junkyard Wars and as a presenter on Coast, a BBC vehicle for him to opine on the terrain of the D-Day landing beaches. Before starting over in France, he also starred in the renovation show It’s Not Easy Being Green, in which he and his first wife, Bridgit, used their engineering and environmental backgrounds to lead an eco-friendly lifestyle in Cornwall, the UK’s answer to the California coast. After they divorced, Dick turned to farming and sailing content until he met and married Angel, purchased Château-de-la-Motte Husson for under £300,000, and started filming. As with the Gaineses, the restoration progressed according to a traditionally gendered division of labor. Dick began on the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work—sewage previously drained into the moat—and Angel lent her talents to the interiors. The show ended abruptly in 2022 after a voice memo circulated of Angel calling a producer a “fucked-up little cunt,” but its 2018 spinoff Escape to the Château DIY, now known as Château DIY, became a launchpad for the Pethericks and other stars of the châteauverse: a loose network of two dozen or so YouTube channels run by English-speaking expats renovating stately French country homes.

Escape to the Château DIY was a boot camp for rookie chatelains. Dick and Angel acted as consultants, advising on wallpapers, devising business plans, and designing compost toilets (a trick from Dick’s Cornwall years). Unsurprisingly, the pandemic took a toll on the B&B/movie set/wedding venue business, and the homeowners needed to identify less conventional revenue streams. They found what they needed on YouTube. Riding the coattails of Escape to the Château DIY, the same chatelains took their boomer viewership off cable and into the algorithm, where they quickly expanded their audience. While each channel maintains a distinct aesthetic—or accent at least—nearly half are variations on the winning Chip-and-Jo formula. Among the happy couples are Anna and Phillip Mayrhofer, a British textile designer (formerly of Balmain) and Tyrolean filmmaker (“the Terrence Malick of Waste Pipe Tutorials”) who decamped from Paris with their two young daughters to restore a Norman castle on How to Renovate a Château (Without Killing Your Partner); Aussies Tim Holding and Felicity Selkirk of Château de Purnon: Reawakening a French Château, the former Labour parliamentarian and marketing executive doing the same in southwestern France; Oh No! Another Château’s Gustavo Nogueira and Reni Lane, a São Paulo–born architect and American “rock star” who are taking down the “invisible walls” of their nineteenth-century mansion to create a “vibrant cultural hub”; and NorCal’s Daphne and Ian Fig, beneficiaries of the Château de Lésigny near Paris and hosts of YouTube’s The Beau Château and now also HGTV’s Castle Impossible. (Today the cable-to-streaming pipeline flows in two directions.)

If photogenic hetero couples living out their aristocratic fantasies doesn’t entice, the châteauverse is vast enough to meet almost any taste, offering endlessly improbable riffs on the twenty-first-century chatelain: There’s Stephanie Jarvis, the Oxford-educated, opera-singing prima donna of  The Château Diaries, Tom Garneau and Damien Verhaegen, the jacked Québécois gays behind Château Poséidon, and Stanislav Simonenko, the burly, accordion-playing engineer-cum-welder who operates the channel Pannard Brut through “sweat, fire, steel, and sheer will.”

Apart from Daphne Fig, who inherited her château from her grandfather, the new generation of chatelains are not to the manor born. As content creators, they are bound by the class solidarity of the hustle. Quid pro quo is an engine of shared prosperity, and no feed is in direct competition with any other. As in other YouTube influencer networks, the more they promote each other’s projects and push crossover videos, the more likely the viewer is to subscribe to multiple channels and become invested in the palace intrigues archived on r/ChateauUnhinged, the fan community’s dedicated subreddit. Across the châteauverse, the two villains of choice are the original Château DIY stars-turned-vloggers, the matriarch Stephanie Jarvis and again, inevitably, “Crowbar Billy” Petherick.

The first to go online was Stephanie, who started uploading daily vlogs from Château de Lalande in 2018. Her videos reveal the strangeness of trying to modernize a castle once owned by Louis XIV’s cousin and now staffed by a revolving door of volunteers and expat drifters, as well as her own cousins. In addition to her vlogs and a bed and breakfast, she runs a Patreon account where each tier corresponds to a noble rank, from “Lord and Lady” to “Dauphin and Dauphine.” Together with her twentysomething fiancé, Philip Janssen, and Michael Petherick, she also sells floral aprons, tea towels, and pot holders. It was Stephanie who encouraged Michael to begin his own YouTube series, Doing It Ourselves, and Michael who prompted his siblings to begin The Pethericks and Sadie in France (later renamed Mucky Mansion), a channel dedicated to Sadie and Stanislav’s renovation of Château Pannard. Since their split, Sadie has changed the name back, and Stan has revived a previous channel, Pannard Brut. After the success of the Pethericks, Dan the Gardener, a frequent guest star on Stephanie’s vlogs, purchased his own château and started Escape to
Rural France.

IF THE ILLUSION OF ATTAINABILITY embodied by the Gaineses seems dubious in the context of châteaux, it may be worth, as many online commenters do, indulging in some back-of-the-envelope math. The median sale price for a condo in Brooklyn is around $900,000, while a château in rural France typically sits somewhere between €300,000 and €1.2 million, excluding the (maybe profitable!) renovations. With adjustments made for the lower cost of living, the prospect of doing it yourself (or with your wealthy European partner) may start to seem less preposterous. Though Waco doesn’t pose the challenge of visas, foreign loans, tax treaties, and French, it also lacks the romance that entices us with images of a life that seems both ludicrously out of reach and somehow, if we play our cards right or are dealt a better hand, almost feasible.

Then begins the remodel. The scale of most of these projects is, to any eye trained on home makeover shows, guaranteed to be impossible within the projected budget and timeline. In the first year, the home becomes an enterprise that encompasses far more than anything seen on TV or VRBO. It is then that the chatelains—still living in the servants’ quarters, still without the sponsorship of an AI lawnmowing firm, and swiftly burning runway after the big initial outlays—appear most sincere to their audience. Many of them view their new property as their ticket out of the rat race and the chance to live quieter, more meaningful lives closer to the land. Though they’ve managed to make the move, the price of holding on to the money pit that is their home is steep. Staying out of the red means almost total exposure. The demands of packaging all aspects of the renovation into content mean everything from family dinners to trips to the dumpster will be documented and sold. Once they decide to take their lives online, they are as tied to their château as any landed aristocrat.

With a noble house comes the expectation of noblesse oblige. With few exceptions, the chatelains don’t want to give the impression of laziness or, worse, grift. The bigger the renovation, the more likes, subscribers, and Patreon rents. To retain their followings the owners are constantly incentivized to take on new projects or to redo previous ones—this isn’t Waco, they can’t move to the next château down the block—and so the estates remain in a state of rudderless reconstruction. The lord and lady of the house not only have to play host, historian, tastemaker, and homemaker; they must also be their own painters and project managers. One of the most reliable ways to reach a critical mass of subscribers has been the performance of industry. The harder the manual labor, the larger the population of eager digital vassals—as evidenced by the breakout success of Dan the Gardener, whose Escape to Rural France, with its 673,000 subscribers, is ChâteauTube’s most popular channel.

Retaining Old World charm while bringing the buildings up to code is costly and exhausting. Each château must be equipped with the conveniences of a contemporary McMansion, complete with HVAC, insulation, plumbing, and electricity—all of which are expensive and often, as in the case of heating, never, fully functional. (See Château de la Lande’s elaborate geothermal system on The Château Diaries or, for the lonely, the Strawbridges’ online store stocked with hot-water bottles to cuddle through winter nights.) Decaying seats of feudal power are restored to serve three masters: the bourgeois proprietors, the at-home viewers, and the guests real and imagined. Design conventions suited to upscale suburban developments are projected onto the skeletons of centuries-old buildings that need retrofitting to meet the demands of a digital economy. The servants’ quarters are converted into the owners’ private apartments; stables are repurposed into video-editing suites; and the bulk of the house, the preserve of the viewer, becomes a spectacle of exposed wiring, parquet floors, and “secret” doorways strategically revealed to the camera, all in asymptotic evolution toward a synthesis of modern comfort and precapitalist authenticity. Only when subscriber counts balloon and the dust begins to settle do some chatelains migrate to the main house, which was supposed to belong to us. Plans to rent the space as a wedding venue soften, and more elaborate digital schemes for money-making take hold. After sufficiently priming the audience with bespoke this and hand-painted that, the chatelains begin to offer us a sliver of what they have, whether in the form of kitchen linens, candles, handwritten cards, master classes, or—of course—still more exclusive videos.

Outwardly faithful to the stated end of hosting paying guests—the threat of holidays or wedding season impose their spectral deadlines—the chatelains frack the lulls between emergencies for diminishing reserves of content. An idyllic image of rural France is cultivated alongside the house itself via tours of French flea markets and excursions into folk wisdom. Between big reveals, shopping hauls, and quasi-educational lectures, the YouTubers turn whatever scraps and rubble they can into videos, but the charm Philipp of How to Renovate a Château exudes in his narration of electrical time lapses can only hold the Reels-adapted mind for so long. Billy has recently taken to posting ASMR construction videos, filmed at what appears to be golden hour and interrupted, occasionally, by an invitation to “crack on” with him and the gang. Brazilian architect Gustavo dresses up his vlogs with psychoanalytic asides. In one of his weekly updates, he introduces the Oh No! Another Château community to Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “transitional object,” citing a Brazilian architectural theorist he doesn’t name (Shirlei Zonis). Zonis’s example is a pacifier; Gustavo’s is two eighteen-wheelers loaded with family heirlooms like a pair of life-size porcelain hunting dogs. Maybe the most unnerving attempt to breathe life into the renovation doldrums is the zoo-like enclosure of Jarvis’s grand salon, now undergoing its second remodel. After uncovering a painted ceiling beneath the plaster while redoing the upstairs bedrooms, she installed plexiglass and plywood through which guests can enjoy the spectacle of artisans at work.

Subscribers often want to know more about the eventual use of these buildings. Confronted with one such question, Billy Petherick outlined his plans for his deconsecrated convent, which may involve company retreats, “community things,” live music, fitness, and art. A library has been considered but not installed because of his fear of “random people wandering in and taking books out.” Gustavo and Reni have announced they will host four artists in residence at Château de la Ferté, the transformation of which into a “cultural oasis” will require a functional kitchen with original tomettes and bedrooms soundproofed for jam sessions. During a sailing expedition this past summer, Anna and Philipp of How to Renovate a Château decided to change course on renovating their property’s coach house. Initially they had planned an atelier, an office, and a Swedish sauna for the space, but after restoring the façade, they decided their YouTube and Patreon revenue was not adequate to the task and returned to the more traditional concept of a B&B. (The Patreon peanut gallery suggested medium-term rentals instead, to attract digital nomads and couples taking extended holidays abroad.) Sometimes, the chatelains run out of money or motivation, at which point they end up selling the property to another couple who immediately start their own channel, as was the case with Château de la Ferté, once owned by British YouTubers Carole and Adrian Cushing, now home to Oh No! Another Château’s Reni and Gustavo.

WHICH KIND OF CHÂTEAU RENOVATION is me? Rock star? Relic thief? Australian? In the châteauverse, the logic of a 2010s Buzzfeed quiz is projected onto medieval parcels. With the exception of Château de Purnon, whose owner’s background in politics lends well to navigating French bureaucracy and securing a partially state-funded renovation project, little attention is given to how the new program aligns with the building’s history. The nuances of architectural period and style are of little consequence to the genre’s Anglophone audience—to say nothing of the feudal relations that once structured life on these estates. What matters is that the château is old, French, and classy—or, more importantly, that it reads that way. The 1921 mansion on the Petherick estate looks old, and that’s good enough. The chatelains best able to shrink the distance between a fairy-tale world and our own attract viewers so devoted that they contribute more than their attention. The transition of renotainment from cable to YouTube introduced an HGTV audience to the immediacy of the vlog and comments section and, in turn, to a form of parasocial connection against which they had developed no natural defense. Viewers become Patreon supporters become in-person volunteers, who travel to work without pay as gardeners, painters, and servers; better-heeled fans become paying guests and clients. Meanwhile, a sizable percentage of ChâteauTube’s subscriber base is willing to pay a premium to watch their favorite creators live their seigneurial dream and to feel essential in a small way to its realization. One woman on r/ChateauUnhinged admits:

Our ancestors, or someone’s ancestors, ended the reign of the lords of these French manors circa 1789, and now we pay to watch the new occupants work the same dirt. We do it because we want to see them deserve what they have, as we ourselves might someday deserve it. We also want a piece of architectural history that precedes exurban development, an architecture of artisans and patrons recovered intact from the rubble of modernist disappointment. If the appeal of  Fixer Upper lay in the rootedness of an idyllic (if rusty) small town, why not send the roots deeper? When owning a two-bedroom apartment is no longer financially attainable, more elaborate fantasies begin to move into the realm of the possible.

Meanwhile, from our cramped apartments and post-historical suburbs, we can sign up to join Anna of How to Renovate a Château for the next class at her Soulful Home Academy, where a lucky three hundred—there was a waiting list of four thousand—recently learned how to “create an authentic home with soul and personality.” While Anna works on her “problem room,” Domaine de la Le Fleur’s grand salon, we too can work on ours.