HOMES:
Drawn by the magic of a ruined French castle, Karina Waters has devoted herself to waking a sleeping beauty from her slumber.
restoring an 18th century French chateau
When Karina Waters rst met the Château de Gudanes, it had trees growing inside, brown fungi and green lichen on the walls. There was the staccato of dripping water, the stench of damp and rotting wood, and the ceilings and roof had collapsed in one part of the house. Looking up, she could see through four oors to the sky. The chateau, abandoned and unloved, seemed unlikely to last another winter.
In spite of this unpromising meeting, Karina fell in love – it would become an all-consuming, unconditional love. There was, she says, “a gravitational pull. It was impossible not to be compelled to care.”
On that rst visit, she and husband Craig were only able to look at four rooms – the rest were dangerously crumbling. In them, she saw not just the mushrooms and algae growing, but the elegant parties of the past, ladies in bodices, ballgowns, garlands of fruit and owers, “the black manes of horses, white carriages, a woman with a parasol”. There was a chapel where the oor, altar and outside walls had collapsed, but she could see the hand-painted stars on the ceiling.
The chateau would take her and her family on a journey through time, bringing each perfectly proportioned, ruined room back to life. As Karina slowly transformed the chateau, it transformed her.
Until 2013, Karina Waters was far from being a “chatelaine” (mistress of the castle). She was a corporate tax and superannuation accountant in Perth, married to a urologist. She was emphatically not a renovator of any kind. “I never liked renovating because my mum used to renovate. I grew up in renovation chaos, changing schools all the time, and all I wanted was a quiet life in a normal home.”
It was when their daughter, Jasmine, was on a school exchange trip in France and Craig was following her online that advertisements for picturesque rural properties started popping up. Suddenly they were hooked on the idea of a holiday farmhouse. There were several trips looking at houses that were not quite right before they glimpsed the turrets of Château de Gudanes through the forest. The chateau sits high in the fold of a steep, wooded valley in the Pyrenees, in the Occitanie region in southern France.
It took two years to buy the property, and then the immense task of caring for their new love began.
For the rst phase – the huge structural job of reinstalling the collapsed walls, ceilings and oors – the family decided Karina would have to be there full time, while her husband and teenage children stayed in Perth.
She spent winter in a tent in one of the rooms, with no electricity, heating or
water, sleeping under ve duvets in the snowy mountains, where the temperature plunges to minus 12. The nearest internet, 40 minutes away, was at McDonald’s.
“The reality of living here and the culture, not speaking the language, restoring a historical monument, not really understanding the issues at hand, the impact on the family, keeping a family united” overwhelmed her “many, many times”.
It took three months to remove 500 tonnes of rubble, while Karina sifted through it, looking for nails, tiles, beams, anything that could be recycled back into the building. And day by day the chateau began to reveal herself.
As far as Karina and Craig knew, the neo-classical chateau had been built on the site of a 13th-century fortress by the aristocrat Louis-Gaspard de Sales, a man of wealth and status. He’d used famous architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, whose works included the
Place de la Concorde, and the Petit Trianon and opera theatre at the Palace of Versailles. Château de Gudanes took 10 years to build, starting in 1741.
Then there were the surprises that keep coming. Almost every day the chateau reveals something as they peel back its layers of history. On the rst day the building was stable enough to walk through, Karina was in an upstairs room when a plaster ceiling fell in, revealing painted Renaissance beams dating to the 15th century.
“When we bought the chateau, we were told that only the front part was of interest – that we could consolidate that and lock the back up and never use it. It turned out the back was the actual jewel because it is full of Renaissance detail all covered with plaster, which just makes your heart sing.” She understood then that unlocking the chateau’s past would be the key to understanding her future.
There were delays and dramas getting permissions from the government organisation that controls historic buildings. Frustrating though this was, it was also a gift. Living through the seasons, learning about its long history, visiting archives, the chateau began to speak to Karina.
“We had to adjust our values and our way of living to her and not her to us,” she writes in her book, A True Love Story Never Ends – Château Gudanes. “The chateau was teaching us to slow down and be patient. I began to see life differently.” She began to “grow into the chateau and a more simple, meaningful and connected way of life”.
It was a major shift in thinking about the authenticity and integrity of the building. The restoration began to be about respecting different layers and periods of its history, letting its patina show in peeling walls. “Her rawness, wear and history will not be erased, but instead integrated,” she wrote.
It became clear the chateau wouldn’t be nished to French perfection in ve years – it would evolve over time, and some work might never nish.
“Every room is individual,” Jasmine, now 24, says. “We just go from room to room working out what to do next.
It is about keeping and retaining all these stories, honouring all the people who have lived and worked here.”
The rst time the family smelled food cooking in the chateau was a major turning point, after so long without electricity. “You don’t realise that you could ever be so grateful for such really basic things. It doesn’t just remove all the building’s layers, it removes all your own layers,” says Jasmine.
But while they had electricity in the kitchen, in waiting for permission to wire the rest of the house, they discovered the magic of candlelight. Now Karina has decided to keep it that way, with an impressive collection of candelabra. She found all the furniture in the local markets, all the charmingly mismatched cups and plates. “Rather than ll it with new things, we just thought we would repurpose everything we could nd locally. All the furniture has its own patina.”
Originally the Waters family thought the chateau would be a private holiday home. But they realised a house like this needs people. Karina had posted photos of the restoration on social media for her children, to show them what she was doing. It wasn’t long before the chateau’s charisma had drawn hundreds of thousands of fans on Instagram. Now they come for workshops: to peel back layers of paint and unveil frescos; to see the replace chipped by rebel soldiers during the French Revolution and the champagne fountain in the dining room; and to eat wonderful meals.
“Seeing people in the kitchen, eating and loving it as much as we do, just made so much sense,” Jasmine says. “These people are here because they’ve seen it on Instagram and fallen in love with it. They bring their own stories, they bring life and energy to it.”
In saving and safeguarding it, an Australian family from Perth has become part of the 800-year history of the Château de Gudanes. They are now part of the walls, the patina of this house – their love for it is ingrained in the stone for posterity.
“Her rawness, wear and history will not be erased, but integrated.”