HOW DARE LES ANGLAIS TEAR DOWN OUR CHATEAU MAGNIFIQUE!
This wealthy British couple have just won a 10-year battle to have their neighbour’s sprawling Provence home demolished for flouting planning laws. So why do locals say...
WAnDeR 25 miles inland to the hills above the glamorous playground of the international jet set on the Cote d’Azur and, chances are, you’ll see locals shaking their heads and saying: ‘This is all crazy.’
Crazy indeed. For here, in the district of Grasse, historic home of the perfume industry, stands the stunning £48 million Renaissance- style Chateau Diter which has been ordered, by a French court, to be bulldozed to the ground.
The reason? Property tycoon Patrick Diter — some say ‘artist’, some say ‘visionary’ and some say, less generously, ‘chancer’ — extended his 2,000 sq ft farmhouse into a 32,000 sq ft Italianate palace without first obtaining planning permission.
The magnificent chateau has 18 bedroom suites, two helipads, a swimming pool, a cellar with wine tasting room, a bell tower, a Roman colonnade, hand-painted murals, centuries-old fireplaces and an orangery — to name but a few of its features.
When Simon Cowell landed his helicopter here after renting it for an episode of The X-Factor, he told staff it was ‘ the most beautiful property I have ever seen’.
not so, says 63-year- old Caroline Butt, wife of British millionaire fund manager Stephen Butt, whose lawyers insist it is a ‘verruca on the hillside’ in this idyllic part of the French Riviera.
Revealing her troubles with Mr Diter earlier this week, she claimed he had 132 speakers in the garden.
‘Sometimes the music is so loud we cannot sit out on the terrace,’ she says. ‘You can’t sleep and he has had parties that go on until 5am. It means you cannot enjoy your own home.’
The Butts own the neighbouring 20-acre estate, which includes a six-bedroom house with an astroturf tennis court and gardens designed by the noted landscape architect Russell Page. The public can view these gardens for the price of five euros.
her French retreat was, says Mrs Butt, ‘absolute magic with wonderful views’ until January 2005, ‘ when every time we turned up there was another piece of building coming up’.
In 2009, with the support of neighbours, the Butts decided that ‘the building frenzy had to stop’. This week, an appeal court in Aix- en-Provence ruled that the chateau must be demolished. Only the small original house was spared.
Mr Diter was also fined more than £350,000 and warned that if his chateau is not knocked down by the deadline 18 months from now, he will face further fines of up to £500 a day.
In her first full interview since the decision, Mrs Butt said she was ‘delighted’ by the ruling.
‘We fell in love with this place because of the peace and quiet and the views,’ she says. ‘The views are wonderful and the place is magic, absolute magic.
Themain house didn’t have water or electricity when we bought it in 2001 — it was derelict. We put our hearts into the garden and into the house. The gardens are open to the public from time to time.
‘We’ve planted over 100 fully grown trees. We’ve restored the 19th- century ice house. We’ve planted a rose garden that’s got thousands of roses and there’s a garden full of wild flowers for the butterflies and bees.
‘We’ve put 17 years of energy into this place and we no longer have those 17 years. It’s a family home for our children [ she has two grown-up children], for Stephen’s parents — for our family. We were there last weekend and we had lunch outside. It was just divine: the soul, the charm.’
That was until 2011, when Chateau Diter began to host wedding
parties. ‘he had over 700 guests for three days until 5am. I’ll just leave you to imagine what that was like for the enjoyment of the property. It’s not just us. All the neighbours were disturbed by the noise and by the construction. Just ask them.’
Retired university lecturer AnneMarie Sohn, 62, who has a home in the area and supported the Butts in their legal action, is also cock-ahoop at the ruling.
‘It is non- stop building works since 2005,’ she says. ‘The lorries, the noise. It’s me who ends up having to reverse to let lorries pass.
‘Then you’ve got their commercial activities —– weddings, film sets. The music went on until 5am. It was absolute hell. There were times I could feel the air tremble. With the filming, again you have massive lorries turning up — and, again, I have to reverse.’
But not everyone is thrilled with the decision to demolish it. Perfumier France Dieu, whose family have worked here for three generations, is horrified.
‘It is unthinkable that it should be demolished,’ she says. ‘everyone I know has the same feeling. We don’t understand the decision. The chateau adds value to Grasse. It brings employment and sparkle.
‘The Diters are intelligent people who love their town. They have been working on the chateau for years and put their hearts into it. It is modelled on a Tuscan villa, and my feeling is, just like the Taj Mahal, it is a creation that Mr Diter has conceptualised for his Italian wife, Monica. It’s a love story to her.
‘ he comes from very simple beginnings and it’s been a life’s work to create it and it’s not something he will be able to create again. Of course, there have been a few irregularities but to demolish what I’d call a work of art is crazy.
‘Unfortunately, the culture in France is that when someone does well, others don’t like it. French society frowns on people who do well and rise above their beginnings. There is a lot of jealousy.’
These sentiments are shared by local councillor Delphine Belaiche, 45, who lives in the neighbouring village of Aribeau-sur-Siagne.
‘how can Mrs Butt be delighted by the ruling?’ she asks. ‘I know the Diters a little. This is a generous family. They welcome and play host to underprivileged families via a local charity. Their doors are open to support other people in need, and they don’t charge.
‘Mrs Butt might talk about her family home but she’s rarely here.
Her house is rented out for holidays at more than €15,000 a week. Mrs Sohn lives in Paris. She’s mostly here in the summer.
‘Mr Diter has been described as a tycoon or a millionaire. He isn’t. He did most of the work himself. They are a modest family who have been destroyed by this.
‘I know it is not possible for a house to go from 200sq m to 3,000 sq m without the local planning officials or the council being aware of what was going on. You can’t construct a chateau without anyone seeing. It’s not possible.
‘Anyone who sees the chateau cannot fail to see how magical it is. For me, it is a work of art. To want to destroy something that beautiful is absolutely ridiculous. This started out as a grievance between neighbours over noise.
‘The problem is that these people have lots of money so have the funds to hire expensive lawyers.’
Gilles Camagna, a 68-year- old who has spent much of his life in this pastoral idyll and now lives six miles from Chateau Diter, also deplores the ruling.
‘The destruction of a place like this is an abomination,’ he says. ‘The chateau is the opposite of glitzy. It’s the epitome of good taste, both inside and out. There’s nothing excessive. Everything is harmonious. We know the decision is down to the justice system, but surely there are other ways to ensure this is not destroyed?
‘Here, most of the building work is carried out with something we call permis a la provencale where you get a verbal agreement and then apply retrospectively.
‘Mr Diter made mistakes but do you honestly think a chateau this size could have gone up without the authorities knowing? I don’t think this decision by the local administration would have happened had it not been for the persistence of the Butts.’ Mrs Butt is an elegant, precise woman who was born in a well-heeled suburb of Paris before meeting her husband and making her home in the UK.
‘I’m sure Mr Diter has lots of friends and he’s a perfectly likeable person so long as you don’t have to have dealings with him in terms of him building things illegally,’ she says.
‘He’s had plenty of warnings and he decided to ignore every single one of them. There’s a point where you have to bang on the table.’
There was a time though, 18 years ago, that the Diters and Butts sat together to convivially break bread at the same table.
For Mr Diter, the uneducated son of a sick mother and an alcoholic father, entertained the Butts when they first became neighbours.
After leaving school with no qualifications, he discovered a natural talent for renovation from which, in the booming real estate of the South of France, he was able to buy the estate of Saint-Jacques du Couloubrier for 1.5 million euros.
He settled with Monica and their baby daughter Lou-Adele in the farmhouse and in 2001 sold most of the land and the main house to the Butts for three million euros.
Mr Diter has said the development of his house ‘has his heart’. He replanted thousands of trees destroyed by a fire, collected fireplaces, stonework and doors from around Italy, France and Monaco, drove bulldozers, dug the land.
He also filed for a building permit for an extension. Having obtained a verbal agreement from the mayor’s office in 2006, Diter was too impatient to wait for the permit and began work. The permit arrived a few months later.
MEANWHILE,the Butts had completed their property. ‘If, like us, you happen to like trees, if you put a great big thing in the middle of the trees instead of a small farmhouse, it is damaging your view and your enjoyment of what you’re looking at,’ says Mrs Butt.
‘The beauty of nature is being attacked. We rang and wrote to the mairie [town hall] but it’s difficult when you don’t know how the system works and you’re not there. It took us a long time to find our way.’
Indeed, Mr Diter had actually constructed 90 per cent of his chateau, having been granted two permits, before Mrs Butt began her legal action in 2009.
‘During a walk, we suddenly discovered the extent of the building on the other side, not visible from our house,’ explains Mrs Butt, who, by now, was renting out her family retreat for much of the year. ‘This made us understand that serious legal action was required to stop the frenzy,’
The matter is now in the hands of the Diters’ lawyers, who this week served notice that they intend to fight the recent ruling.
Mr Diter has been advised not to speak, but in an earlier interview with France’s Le Parisien, he said: ‘It is mad that I am supposed to be bothering a person who does not live here with the noise, the view — everything. She lives in London; in her castle in London.’
While Mrs Butt continues to offer her family home for up to £15,000 a week for holiday rentals, dear friends rally round Mr Diter as he battles to save his ‘Taj Mahal’.