Like many couples, we had long dreamed of living in France... and we just happened to fall in love with a 19th-century fairytale château, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and even its own moat!
We swapped our two-bedroom flat in East London for an abandoned and derelict castle in the heart of the Loire valley and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with our two children, Arthur and Dorothy.
A Year at the Château follows us from when we first moved to France in the depths of winter and found bedrooms infested with flies, turrets inhabited by bats, the wind rattling through cracked windows, and just one working toilet, which flushed into the moat, through to the monumental efforts that went into readying The Château for our beautiful wedding and incredibly special first Christmas.
Along the way you'll read glorious descriptions of rural life in France, with charming characters, delicious food and wonderful seasonal produce, together with the extraordinary list of renovations and restorations we completed, many of which were never shown on TV.
A Year at the Château is our story of adventure and heart, epic ambitions and a huge amount of hard graft.
