Renovations in Limoges - Part I

Hey everyone!

So I love the facebook feature that tells you what you were doing a year before or what not, and I got this massive update on my youtube that showed me that my family home, which I’ll give you some update about was finished two years ago. So it’s just about two years and two weeks or so.

My family home was built for my mum to be born into, my grandad and grandma picked the layout and we live in a village outside of Brighton. It’s a very small place and it’s literally in the South Downs, so that’s where I spent my entire childhood. The street has loads of houses and bungalows that were all built during the 60s and they’re all crazy layouts, they’re not modern and they’re a bit of a wacky system of people, who me and my sister were all forced to call our aunties and uncles growing up.

So during 2017 my grandad, sadly had been struck with really bad symptoms associated with his Parkinsons disease. It’s a horrible process and my mum was an amazing source of restbite and care for him, so she’s again my inspiration for many reasons. But we lost him and it became a bit of an upturning situation for more than the emotional side of losing a loved one. We basically had to negotiate how we were going to tackle keeping the house, because one thing that we were not privy to was the set up of the will. I’m not going to go into any logistics but get your will sorted, it’s a legal reality for things and if you have a situation where your emotionally attached to a property, get things in writing so that lawyers don’t take significant portions of your valuables.

So we began to work out what to do, I moved my home, we began renovations and it was a full deconstruct to reconstruct project.

So with this house, it has so many memories and I posted a lot of images in my trailer blog here and family photos here that is actually in the same house, it’s unrecognisable. But the textures we used, the prints, were all about creating longwearing, gorgeous, simplistic and desaturated backdrops to mad splashes of vivid colour. Which describes us perfectly! Lots of high quality fabrics, woods, slate, hand made tiles, textures, I love pairing mattes with gloss. Leathers from sustainable sources, this is not my home so don’t get it twisted. I gave the coinz and some of the help but this is my family go to.

So it’s been a thereputic two years because being in this space as a family for lots of amazing occasions in that time has been healing. It’s been something that I’ve been joyfully experiencing.

So in addition to my family renovation, we have an ongoing project in France with my lovely Baron, and I wanted to post a mini update about that project because the official Haus of Agitprop and Team Baron HQ are being renovated and finished as we speak. There is a number of buildings on the estate so he’s doing basically a nine bedroom main building, which is developed into a seven bedroom building with library and theatre. There’s a loft conversion, the logistics are all in keeping witht the style of the listed buildings so it’s quite crazy.

There are some really cool and interesting architectural features like this tendency for french houses to construct boxes around any curves? Very scary because my dad struck fear in my heart when he told me that the potential reason for this was to secure the position of the stairs to the wall, whereas the Baron had just literally deconstructed it haha… But all is well! Touch wood! So the main building is being headed by Baron + mama L so they’re going full hog on the whole renovation and we’ll do a feature on this properly when the structural stuff is all done. The Baron’s been working literally like a crazy person doing the lifting, throwing beds out the window from the 1900s, very impressive stuff.

The colours have to be within the code of the Mayor, as they rule the roost in any Hamlets. Strangely theres been a difficulty getting light fixtures? So it’s quite hard with finding the right people, Mark can speak French but not fluently so getting English workers and French workers to help was a mission. He’s done awesome.

So next door is the offices, that’s a barn conversion in the works. Down the way is the Stables and the Gite, there are two wells on the land that have recently been discovered in the bush. There’s also been a discovery of an outhouse, so it’s really like a mad winter wonderland of discovery. Check that out here.

During the recent storms, some of the trees have been uplifted and there’s a substantial amount of land on the property so there’s loads of stuff ongoing. When I’m in London I’m often shocked to see films of Baron looking out one of the balconys to see the neighbour leading an entire herd of cows down the road. It’s a crazy reality to have ‘escape to the chateux’ happening in real time for me, but alas. God had the plan.

So much is coming and I’m excited for a new project I’ve been dreaming up. So more to come.