Château Tour: Hidden Floors & Secret Staircases
[Music] Château de Purnon's elegant architecture is all about symmetry and harmony straight lines and simplicity what was done on one side of the château was replicated on the other it was all intended to be pleasing to the eye [Music] sometimes the doors are mock or the shutters conceal a false window this was not done to evade window tax as some people may believe at Purnon all of these devices were designed to preserve the exquisite harmony and balance of the château's [Music] facades but look closely why are some of the shutters divided into three parts? What secrets do they conceal inside the château? [Music] this week come with us as we explore Château de Purnon's hidden levels and the secret staircases that access them [Music] in French they're called entresol literally between the floors and at Purnon half a dozen rooms lie hidden between our ground floor and the first floor the ceilings on our ground floor are more than 4 and 1/2 M high or just over 15 ft but as soon as we arrived at Purnon we noticed that in several parts of the château's ground floor the ceilings were strangely much lower just under 2 and 1/2 M or around 8 ft to understand this we need to take our mind back to life in a large aristocratic family at the end of the 18th century a noble family employed dozens of people to keep them comfortable in the château basement and the out buildings there were cooks, stable hands, carriage drivers, gardeners but inside the château an army of staff tended to the family's every needs they helped them get dressed in the morning they lit their fires their candles served at the table emptied their chambered pots and was there day and night but they had to be unobtrusive and invisible these entroles are where they lived and works [Music] this entresol has the most precarious of staircases coming up to it but to give you an idea of size we are probably 2 and 1/2 M square the ceiling height is just above my height and so I can stand properly I don't need to to crouch in here you can see that the Bell is still in place this is the original 18th century Bell so this entresol was actually for the maid of Madame de la Motte Baracé now Madame de la Motte Baracé was the Marquises' mother so the whole family lived here the mother included and she's in quite a separate Wing to the rest of the family she's on the ground floor and so this entresol sits above her dressing room her bedroom has full 4 and 1/2 m high ceilings and then behind it is a beautiful dressing room with original 18th century wallpaper and this terribly complicated difficult staircase to get up arrives here and so her maid here had quite a small room but she had her own wardrobe which is very unusual she also had windows that go to the west of the château and they're double windows but this original bell was rung from down in Madam's bedroom makes quite a piercing sound and it's important to remember while we're looking at these entresols that not all of the maids and valet that attended to the family members had an entresol so we have quite a lot of very secret discreet corridors that lead to rooms that are not entresols that were maids and valet bedrooms and these are adjacent to the family members bedrooms so some of them were in these entresols and some of them had rooms that were actually adjacent to the bedrooms but I'm going to make my way down this terribly narrow steep staircase and show you the next one this is the largest of Purnon's entresols and it is as you can see currently housing our very large collection of 18th and 19th century chamber pots and when we arrived this room was being used as a laundry and it had been used as a laundry for some time the walls were black with soot there was a fireplace in the corner where water had been heated and used in the washing process the original purpose of this room however may not have been for a laundry because when we arrived at Purnon you may remember we were extremely lucky to have intact the original château archives and these were immense archives and proved to be a real treasure trove for us for understanding the layout of each of the floors of the Château and that is aiding us in the restoration of the Château but this room was actually marked as a chambre de domestique so it was originally intended to be a maid's room and whether it had been a Maids room and then was altered to become a laundry later or whether it started out as a laundry and remained a laundry we do not know but it is currently being used as our current laundry although if you've been following the progress of our restoration of the interior of the château you will know that this is not going to be our future laundry because that is elsewhere in the on the first floor of the cchâteau but we have grand plans for this room and we cannot wait to share that with you soon [Music] this entresol is accessed from a staircase located behind Purnon's salle a manger so the château's dining room and next to that room is actually the Marquis and the Marquess' bedroom so this entresol is positioned very close to their bedroom and on the original 18th century plans it's marked as the bedroom for the Lackey and so that is the manservant who would have been without doubt the Marquis' valet and so this room actually has windows in it has windows that go out to the south so it gets the afternoon light and the view out over the park the ceiling height is the same as the other entresols it's quite small but you still have quite a lot of room to move around this is actually a room that we are currently working on you can see that we've just started to put electricity into here and this room we had dreams of having it finished before winter actually I'm not sure if we're going to get there or not but this is going to be made into a winter snug it's a small room we can keep it warm it can be comfortable because during winter the rest of the château can be a pretty uncomfortable place to live and even though now we do have a heating system in the section of the Château that we leave this room will stay nice and warm because it also has a radiator from that heating system up here and so its future is as our snug and so it will be a really beautiful place for us to retreat to and be comfortable and warm but let's see if we can get it finished in time for winter or not I'm not sure we've got a huge amount going on at the moment and we don't seem to be getting a lot of time to work on our interior projects but the fact that the power has gone in is a very good step forward we'll see how we go [Music] this entresol is accessed by the most lovely of staircases for Purnon's entresols and it comes directly up from the Marquess' dressing room and so we can very confidently say that this entresol was the for the maid of the Marquess on the original 18th century plans it's marked as chambre de domestique it may have actually been a shared bedroom it's possible that this was also where Adelaide the daughter of the Marquee and the Marquess' maid stayed who knows or it could possibly be that the maid was shared between mother and daughter in the staircase is the original 18th century bell the bell was accessed from the Marquess' dressing room and then this room actually is interesting because even though it's only the maid's room Purnon's architect was still working with symmetry in these entresols and you can see here that the doors are completely symmetric on either side of the room this door here is for a cupboard and the second door as you know is for access at the moment this room has proved to be incredibly helpful for the restoration work that we've been doing in the en-suite on the first floor directly above this entresol and it's meant that we can access under the floor for water arrival and evacuation without touching the original 18th century floor boards which means that we've been able to retain those beautiful floor boards with all that character it's the en-suite where we used that incredible Farrow & Ball wallpaper from the Purnon Papers collection it was a wallpaper that was originally discovered here at the Château and now up in that on suite and the future of this room who knows really at the moment it's proving incredibly valuable for access to the first floor once we are confident that we've got everything we need to get in under the floor there we will create a hatch and close this off but it may just always be a storage room its location close to the salle a manger means it's very helpful for additional furniture for the dining room so maybe that's its future we'll see we're yet to decide [Music] [Music] this entresol has two rooms in it and is accessed via a secret cupboard in the Marquis bureau and so given its location it certainly wouldn't have been used for accommodating domestic staff in fact the 18th century plans this side of the plan for the entresol level is too degraded so we don't actually have the original plans to indicate to us what these two rooms might have been used for but given their location it's unlikely they were used as bedrooms it's more likely that this was some space that the Marquis used himself the first room has quite a lot of storage for fencing equipment horse tack there's magazines and then this room has cupboards where we've been storing various finds candle holders bells lamps all those sorts of things and so it could have been used as a workshop so a repair room it could have been used for storage but unlikely it was used for accommodation and for us at the moment it's probably likely that these will become our archive rooms [Music] and so there you have it a tour of Purnon's entresols hidden spaces in between the first floor and the ground floor here at the Château used to house domestic staff or for various other uses which maybe are not quite clear to us yet but lovely atmospheric little spaces and a really interesting insight into life in the 18th century and the divide between the family and their domestic staff who were here to serve them [Music] one of the questions we get asked most often is what was life really like at Purnon just after its construction at the end of the 18th century and I think these entresols these levels between the levels or these mezzanine levels really give us an insight into answering that question because really there were two sets of lives being lived at Château de Purnon and there was a set of lives being lived by the noble family by their guests by people of really some wealth and with aristocratic titles and then there was a totally separate life being lived by the people who served them and who worked for them and it must have been a very difficult life and the two lives really blended in perhaps seamlessly with each other and it's really quite interesting because when the entresols were constructed they were constructed to make sure that the domestic staff that the working staff here at Purnon were always in close contact with the aristocratic family that they served but at the same time they were invisible and I think that's a really interesting insight into answering that question as to what life was really like here at Château de Purnon and when we first arrived we hadn't even seen some of these entresols they were hidden behind doors that looked like cupboards they were up rickety staircases that were not very accessible and so one of the great things about that is that they were rooms that had really been undisturbed for many many decades and they contained some of the best Treasures that we found not necessarily things of great monetary value but things that were very very old and stuff that really gave us an insight into how life was lived at the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century because those spaces really hadn't been disturbed and I think the other unexpected thing about the entresols is how practical they've been for us actually now while we're restoring the insides or while we're starting to plan the restoration of the insides as well because they have given us access to the first floor without disrupting the original 18th century floorboards and so for all our water arrival and evacuation and electrical work and so on it's actually been really practical and quite a gift to have been to have the access via them so they're very interesting aren't they Purnon's entresols and as always if you'd like to follow the restoration of Château de Purnon more closely we post frequent updates on Instagram we post an exclusive weekly video for our Patreon members and for our YouTube members and this week for the exclusive video we're taking a closer look at Purnon's incredible Lebanese Cedars and how we're planting for the future to protect the park in the centuries to come otherwise just hit the Subscribe button turn on your Notifications and we'll keep you updated here [Music]
2024-11-19 09:49
