While living in London and Africa, Fiona and Miles Warner decided to create a château home, and later business, in France, they tell Anna Tobin
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The Warner family had been dividing their time between London and Africa, where Fiona and her husband Miles had been working, but it was on a holiday to Aquitaine that they began to think about putting down deeper roots in France.
“Back in 2001, while we were here visiting Miles’s parents who had bought a house close by in the 1970s, we viewed Château de Pécile for the first time,” explains Fiona. Tucked away in the hillside village of Bazens, the château was in a bad way. There were acacia saplings growing out of the floorboards in the main salon, shutters precariously hanging from the windows and a single cold-water tap. Yet it wasn’t uninhabited. The owner lived in one room, heated with a wood-burning stove. And she had a fascinating story to tell.
“Monique Fillerin had been a teenage resistance fighter in the Second World War, working with her parents on the Pat O’Leary line, which helped Allied soldiers shot down over France. Monique maintained lifelong friendships with everyone she’d helped and when she realised we were English, she really warmed to us and began showing us all the treasures she’d kept around the house,” says Fiona “This included letters from Airey Neave and other airmen Monique had helped evade capture and return to freedom.”
HOME TO STAY
The château had been on the market for a decade, but the owner was looking for a buyer who would love the property as much as she did and she was adamant that it must not be bought to be turned into a faceless hotel, but remain a home. When the Warners passed her scrutiny, she finally agreed to sell to them in 2002. “The purchase was very straightforward,” says Fiona. “Once we’d agreed the price, we found a local notaire who worked with the vendors’ notaire and we completed within about six months.”
While Fiona and Miles were delighted at the prospect of turning the derelict property into a welcoming family home, their children – Hugo, who was 12 at the time, Alexander, 11, Cosmo, nine, and Maximo three – were a little more sceptical about living somewhere where trees had literally taken root.
Luckily for them, they didn’t have to take up residence straight away. The Warners move
