How many times have you scrolled through Instagram’s myriad chateaux accounts or visited foreign real estate sites “just for fun,” to look up the price of villas in some European countryside to fix up and move into yourself? How many times have you watched your favorite HGTV show and thought, “how hard could it be?” You’re not alone in finding yourself lost down a rabbit hole of chateaux, historic houses, renovations, and DIY tips; Abigail Carter was one of them before she accomplished her dream of running a chateau abroad.
In early 2021, Carter’s daughter sent her a link to a YouTube video by How to Renovate a Chateau (without killing your partner), an account that documents a European couple who left Paris for the Normandy countryside, where they bought a once-dilapidated 18th-century chateau. “I started watching them and it just reminded me so much of my late husband and I,” says Carter, whose husband, Arron, died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks while at a conference in the World Trade Center. “I was like, ‘What am I doing with my life? Is Seattle where I want to stay and be?’”
Seattle had been Carter’s home since 2005 for a different project—it’s where she bought and successfully renovated a 1913 firehouse—but the 58-year-old has always been an adventurous person and avid traveler. So, in early 2021, Carter began to scratch an itch that had been there since she and her late husband had fantasized about buying a small French farmhouse years ago, on a trip to Auberge while they were living in Brussels.
“It was the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and I was sort of reeling,” says Carter sitting in a verdant, scraggly garden of Chateau de Borie—her own early-19th-century chateau she purchased in August 2022. “I was at this crossroads in my life and Arron’s motto was always, ‘If you don’t like your life, change it.’” She’s strived to live by that motto ever since his death.
Here’s how she accomplished the feat of moving abroad to purchase and restore her very own chateau, which she says has been a labor of love. Plus, the missteps to avoid if you’re interested in taking your scrolling habit into a full-fledged, life-changing move abroad, á la Under the Tuscan Sun.
Chateau shopping: How to find options in your price range
Before you book that flight to France, Carter says the journey should start online. There are quite a few good sites, but she wound up using one exclusively: Le Figaro. Though her perusing began as an escape from the pandemic, once travel was safe for her she decided to book a flight to visit a few properties she’d found on Le Figaro. She created a spreadsheet which allowed her to keep track of all the properties she was interested in, sorting them by location, price, and size. She was looking in the southwest of France for homes in the $400,000 to $600,000 range, for example. With that, she was able to plot out the properties she liked in various areas. Next, she began contacting property agents, who she says take you a little more seriously when you have a specific date you want to visit.
Getting inside, and all the details
Carter rented a car and had hotels booked ahead of time, leaving a few days open to lock down some chateau visits after she arrived. But it was getting inside the actual homes that helped Carter narrow down what she really wanted in terms of location, building type, renovation potential, and more. At first, she thought she simply must have a turret, and all the old, original features of the home’s time period. But there was always something that had to be compromised if she stuck to those requirements: it was in the middle of nowhere, next to a busy highway, or there was a loud quarry nearby. Eventually, she found her dream chateau—a 12-bedroom, 12-bathroom Maison de maître just outside the town of Agen with a large garden, a detached cottage, and five cave rooms built into the adjacent cliff behind the house.
