 [The Telegraph] Like many others, when Dick Strawbridge and his wife, Angel Adoree, decided to uproot from England with their young family and move to France for la belle vie, they envisaged a modest farmhouse, perhaps a simple gîte. However, 45 rooms, 78 windows, 12 acres, one moat and 10 exhausting months later, they are the owners of a beautiful château, a five-floor home in Pays de la Loire, 10 times the size of your average British house ‐ all for the unbelievable figure of £280,000.
But like most fairy tales, there was a catch. This château came with no electricity, heating or water, a sanitation system that emptied into the moat ‐ not to mention hundreds of dead flies, bats (very much alive) and lavatories that hadn’t been flushed for 40 years. It would take a person with sizeable enthusiasm and energy to take on a restoration challenge like that and come out the other side smiling.
Luckily, Strawbridge has form. The retired Lieutenant Colonel first appeared on our screens as a plucky and resourceful contestant on the Channel 4 series Scrapheap Challenge (he went on to present the programme), before starring in three series of BBC Two’s It’s Not Easy Being Green in the mid-Noughties, about his struggles to live an ecologically friendly, low-impact life, with first wife Brigit and their teenage children. His latest project has required every ounce of his gung-ho spirit.
"People talk about going off and having their adventure and we’ve just done it," says the 56-year-old. "We’ve got wild boar in our forest, deer wandering around the front, kingfishers and red squirrels. It’s all pretty special. We do pinch ourselves that it is a bit ridiculous. But we made a choice to not live within the M25." The couple had spent four years searching for the perfect place to bring up their family, Arthur, three, and Dorothy, two. "They are now growing up in a place where if they play hide and seek, they may never find each other," Dick says.
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