Maison d’être: the Aussie MP who swapped politics for a grand French château

Tim Holding is standing in a room of potties. Specifically, they’re chamber pots: 21 wooden boxes with a ceramic bowl under their lids. “It’s like an 18th- and 19th-century museum of toilets, basically,” says the former Victorian state government minister, midway through giving me a video tour of Château de Purnon, the stupendously grand but neglected 105-room estate in rural France he purchased with fiancée Felicity Selkirk last year.

Holding has employed a Magic Faraway Tree approach to organising items painstakingly gathered from around the château, but especially the vast attic, which has turned out to be quite the treasure trove. Just as Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree was visited by themed lands – the Land of Topsy-Turvy, say, or the Land of Presents – Holding, 49, has designated these second-floor rooms a particular genre. There’s a room of rugs, another of picture frames, yet another of religious paraphernalia. There are whole rooms of candelabras, lamps, porcelain. And this one, of extremely old toilets.

This moment is a bit surreal. As a former state political reporter, I never imagined Holding would be revealing to me his toilet collection. Indeed, the whole château thing is completely out of character for the Labor MP I knew. That guy was an ambitious and ruthless factional warrior. That guy entered Parliament in 1999, with portfolios including finance, police and water, and was renowned for being exacting and rigorous (as police minister, he refused to continue reading a memo after the first paragraphs contained two errors; hence missing news of a major police files leak). That guy was often mooted as a premier-in-waiting until, in 2010, Daniel Andrews claimed the Labor leadership.

This guy, by his own admission, has made a “bonkers” and “somewhat reckless” decision in buying the 18th-century Purnon, an official monument historique that needs a multimillion-dollar restoration.

“If you’d said to me on the day I retired from politics, ‘You’ll go and restore a château in France,’ I’d have said, ‘Are you crazy?’”

It’s tempting to trace this strange life twist back to when Holding made national headlines in 2009. A police helicopter plucked the minister from a rocky ridge after he got lost in the Victorian Alps for two days in freezing conditions. But, alas, there was no hint then of the château idea. (Although in the seconds it took to slide the initial 200 icy metres from Mount Feathertop’s summit – when he thought death was imminent – he did have something of a life reassessment. “It wasn’t like I thought, ‘I don’t want to be in politics any more.’ It just made me more impatient about wanting to do more things in life.” )

Indeed, when Holding did leave politics in 2013, aged 40, all he knew was that he wanted a second career, but wasn’t sure what that would be. “If you’d have said to me, on the day I retired, ‘You’ll go and restore a château in France,’ I’d have said, ‘Are you batshit crazy?’ ”

And yet here Holding is, with a new social group of fellow château owners he likes to call “a community of the insane and the deranged” (they visit each other’s châteaux, inspect each other’s roofs). And with Selkirk he’s committed to saving Purnon, whose leaky roof threatens to completely destroy her.

“We’ll spend everything we’ve got,” says Holding about his mission. “We don’t have kids, so it’s not like we’re destroying the inheritance. We obviously won’t go into debt. But we will save the château.”

In the library of Château de Purnon.Credit: Antoine Doyen

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France has about 40,000 châteaux, from stodgy 14th-century medieval forts, to turreted fairy-tale castles worthy of Rapunzel, to pretentious country manors. Many, though, have fallen into disrepair and under French inheritance laws – which create multiple heirs – old families are struggling to pull together the resources to meet spiralling maintenance costs. But here’s the good news: rundown châteaux are, at first glance, a bargain!

Holding and Selkirk picked up Purnon for €709,685 (about $1.19 million); they wouldn’t reveal the price but it is published on the French government’s property data website. And it’s not just a château, but also a 24-hectare estate with a chapel, boulangerie (“It is France, after all,” says Holding of his newly acquired bakery), glass-panelled orangerie (where one’s citrus trees survive the winter), stables, dry moat, mill, English park (the garden fashion of the late 1700s), mysterious underground tunnels and dovecote (a source of great tension in pre-revolutionary France, as the nobles’ pigeons ate the peasants’ crops). They don’t own it, but there’s a village that once supported the château. The couple celebrate Bastille Day with the 400 residents of the hamlet, rather unromantically named Verrue (French for “wart”).

Holding and Selkirk join a handful of château-owning Australians, most notably At My French Table author Jane Webster, who in 2005 bought the abandoned 72-room Château de Bosgouet in Normandy; and Karina and Craig Waters, who took on the 18th-century Château de Gudanes, with its breathtaking Pyrenees backdrop in 2013. Back then, wild ponies lived in the cellar, 91 of its 94 rooms had fallen in and gilded cherubs were lying in the debris (the popular @châteaugudanes Instagram account, with 380,000 followers, is just one of the many lockdown-escaping, châteaux-related rabbit holes I fell down while researching this story).

The majority of foreign château owners, however, are British – most famously The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and his 18th-century Château La Fourchette – and there’s even a UK television series called Escape to the Château (available on Binge). The program follows effervescent Dick Strawbridge and flame-haired wife Angel Adoree, who purchased the Disney-like Château de la Motte-Husson for £280,000 in 2015.

In the entertaining offshoot Escape to the Château DIY, Dick and Angel help other “plucky Brits” wake up the sleeping beauties of France (which often involves discovering beehives in chimneys, bats in bedrooms and moat water in the basement).

Unrenovated châteaux are relatively cheap, but restoring them can cost millions of dollars, particularly if a roof is involved. Specialist estate agents warn buyers they could spend at least $80,000 a year on lighting, heating, insurance and maintenance. As Holding and Selkirk discovered, it’s impossible to heat rooms with 4.8-metre ceilings. “It’s like being in a freezer in winter,” Selkirk tells me. (One day, while perusing châteaux for sale online – another escapist digression – I found one spruiking its “human-liveable size”.)

Despite all the practical reasons to avoid châteaux, the allure can prove irresistible: a triumph of heart over head. And that’s what happened to Holding and Selkirk at Purnon. It was love at first sight.

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Felicity Selkirk, 47, has long blonde hair, wears a red-check shirt and jeans and – rather alarmingly – nurses a bandaged left hand. At dinner the previous night, paralysis crept over her hand and, later, she found fang marks on her middle finger. After this interview, doctors at the local hospital told her it’s likely an asp viper bite received while clearing the woods.

Such rotten luck: to have survived all of Australia’s deadly snakes, only to get nipped in France, where most are harmless. “Expecting to be rolled by a large saltwater crocodile in the pool next week,” quips Holding, when he emails later, confirming that Selkirk is doing okay.

Selkirk valiantly continues with the interview and squeezes her hand, as if coaxing it back to full movement. When Holding first talked about buying a château, she says, she tried to ignore it. “I was like, ‘Oh, when is this conversation going to finish? Why does he keep going on about this ridiculous idea?’ ” She is smiling, but also rolling her eyes.

Selkirk and Holding started going out in 2011, after being introduced by a mutual friend, the champion aerial skier and former state MP Kirstie Marshall. In 2014, they moved to Paris, which they used as a base to travel and study. Selkirk, who led the marketing team at the Australian Open Tennis Championships and left in 2005 to establish a digital agency called Website Projects, studied French language and culture at the Sorbonne.

Holding left politics on a generous part-taxpayer-funded pension now scrapped for new politicians (he would not tell me the figure, but most tend to be between $100,000 and $150,000 a year). In 2017, he studied for his master’s in advanced global studies at Paris’s Sciences Po university. The following year, he was appointed a visiting professor at King’s College London, focusing on government responses to terrorism.

“A normal person can buy them. You don’t have to be a Saudi oil prince.”

One day, for reasons he can’t quite recall, Holding looked at châteaux for sale online. “There were thousands and it just struck me what an amazing thing it would be to buy one and restore it,” he says. “And in France, that opportunity beckons because a normal person can buy them. You don’t need to be a Saudi oil prince.”

This idea grew and eventually, in June 2019, Selkirk suggested they inspect a property Holding liked. This was to “shut the idea down” rather than any desire on her part, she says. But when they rang to inquire, the owners had just received an offer. Selkirk felt the sting of disappointment and so both ended up with the château bug.

Six months later – after inspecting 15 châteaux across France – they found Purnon, on the edge of the Scévolles forest in Haut-Poitou, 3½ hours’ drive south-west of Paris. Purnon was not listed online – the owners were too divided about its sale – but an estate agent showed them pictures. They immediately agreed to see it.

When they stood in front of Purnon less than a week later, it was like no other château they’d seen. The main building commands sweeping views down a three- kilometre avenue called a grande allée, flanked by forest. Two stately, 40-metre-long outbuildings mirror each other like wings on either side of the château, a perfect circle of lawn between them. Holding looked at the property’s state and thought: “Oh shit, this is going to be really hard.” But Selkirk knew Purnon was the one. “Welcome home,” she said.

“We don’t have kids, so it’s not like we’re destroying the inheritance. We obviously won’t go into debt. But we will save the château.”Credit: Antoine Doyen

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On the wall behind Frédéric Didier’s left shoulder is a 17th-century tapestry designed by the great French painter Simon Vouet. It’s not every day your interviewee’s Zoom backdrop is more than 300 years old, but Didier, wearing an apricot polo shirt, is in his office at France’s famous Palace of Versailles, where he is chief architect of historical monuments.

In May last year, Didier bounded out of his car and explored Purnon’s every nook. He peeled away wallpaper. He braved ramshackle staircases in his suede slip-on shoes. His enthusiasm was so infectious, the couple soon appointed him their heritage architect. Didier knew Purnon and the de Rochequairie family who had owned it, and had been “very, very afraid” of its disrepair. “For me, Château Purnon is one of the finest examples of the French architecture of the end of the 18th century.”

Didier gives several reasons for this assessment. First: Purnon’s dramatic setting atop a hill at the end of the grande allée. “It’s really something very, very beautiful.” Second, the château remains almost as originally designed, with Holding and Selkirk’s purchase only the second time it’s changed hands. “It’s a real testament to history and that’s very, very rare.”

Purnon’s land was bought in 1771 by Antoine-Charles Achard de la Haye – a lieutenant-colonel of cavalry in King Louis XVI’s army and page to the Duke of Orléans – and his wife Bénigne Modeste de la Motte-Baracé. Didier, who has studied the château’s original plans, says it was, unusually for its time, built with one shared bedroom for wife and husband, not separate quarters. “And the children were in rooms just near their parents, which was also unusual.”

“It’s a real testament to history and that’s very, very rare.”

Didier says the château, originally on 2000 hectares of forest, was a “great aristocratic house” that hosted large hunting parties. But it was finished in 1788, only a year before revolution swept France. In 1789, the hungry and poor rose up against the privileges that underpinned châteaux such as Purnon. In the Great Fear of the same year, noble titles were often burnt.

Achard de la Haye fled to Britain, and de la Motte-Baracé, in a letter written by her lawyer and found in the château, entreated the new finance minister to let her keep her estate. She had been abandoned by her husband, the letter says, one son was mentally ill and another murdered by “the popular fury” of the mob.

She was allowed to keep the château and its furnishings; plenty of other nobles weren’t. “Many of the châteaux were confiscated by the revolutionary government,” says Didier. “Many were sold as national property because the government had great problems with money. Sometimes they were bought by the bourgeoisie [moneyed middle-class] at very low prices.” They were often looted, the furniture destroyed, confiscated or sold. Later, a building may have been dismantled as a source of stone, he says. Achard de la Haye returned from exile in 1797.

In 1893, Daniel Jérôme Robineau de Rochequairie purchased Purnon (his noble title was marquis, above a count but below a duke). In 2013, Daniel’s grandson Gilles de Rochequairie died and, under French inheritance laws, the château passed to a large group of relatives. Purnon’s beautiful slate roof was probably already leaking when Gilles died, but the de Rochequairie heirs could not, or would not, spend enough money to fix it – or stop its ongoing deterioration.

Tackling the lead paint in the kitchen. Credit: Antoine Doyen

On May 19 last year, two de Rochequairies met the couple at Purnon for an historic handover. Pierre de Rochequairie, Gilles’ son, choked back tears. Pierre’s aunt, Nicole de Rochequairie, presented the Australians with the château’s 17-centimetre-long front-door key. “Here is the key to paradise, I hope!” Both de Rochequairies would become the couple’s close friends but, first, a tricky negotiation lay ahead.

Some of Purnon’s furniture had been sold at auction years before, but an enormous amount, across thousands of square metres, was still there. The family appointed an antique dealer called Sérge. Holding and Selkirk wanted to keep pieces that spoke to the life of Purnon residents, such as portraits.

Holding writes about these negotiations in a diary he keeps for his mother, Carol Holding. It makes for stressful reading. “Sérge and his team hover hungrily,” he notes. Confusion reigns. There’s a jumble of French and English and the Australians are unsure what’s valuable and what isn’t. They fail to secure the grand salon curtains. But, luckily, the de Rochequairies have no interest in the attic – literally stuffed to the rafters with 232 years of château furniture and chattels – so they relinquish it all. Didier says he told Holding: “When you discover something in the roof, or in storage, don’t throw it out, even if it is in decay.”

The château’s rococo-style Grand Salon. Credit: Antoine Doyen

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It’s 3pm. Another dreary lockdown day in Melbourne. I dream of popping on a plane and walking around Purnon with Holding and Selkirk, their new puppy Truffe (a truffle dog crossed with an Australian sheepdog) at our heels. Instead I am in my kitchen/home office, staring at my phone and the wobbly video tour Holding is embarking on in the French dawn, the moon still above the château. Holding – intense, thorough – apologises for the lack of light, but as he points the phone northwards I can see the grande allée’s undeviating furrow through the forest before it melts into the dark horizon. It is exquisite.

You could walk in a straight line up the grande allée – not a driveway, note, more an architectural flourish that emphasises grandeur and perspective – through the magnificent 1812 gate, in the front door and out the back: everything is lined up perfectly. This is all explained in Holding’s brief dissertation on neoclassicism and 18th-century Europe’s obsession with the symmetry of ancient Greece and Rome (he first fell in love with neoclassicism during a visit to the English city of Bath in 2000).

“It would be a tragedy if it fell over. It would destroy all the symmetry and harmony that I was just pontificating about before.”

We head off towards the western outbuilding which contains the château’s “lordly” functions, such as the chapel and stables. I can see that the stables’ end of this building has a definite bend, and the previous owners have buttressed it from behind with an ugly wood and metal structure. Luckily, movement detectors show the building is firm, for now. “It would be a tragedy if it fell over,” says Holding, who, with Selkirk, would risk fines if the listed building fell down on their watch. “It would destroy all the symmetry and harmony that I was just pontificating about before.”

In the chapel, I see a small Bible lying open on a pew. Debris covers the floor. But there’s beautiful stained glass and a painting of the Annunciation, which will be restored. Stonemasons recently removed two statues of saints, each weighing 300 kilograms, to protect them in case the ceiling collapsed.

We visit the stables – Selkirk, a keen horse-rider, hopes to restore them – and head back across the château’s face. There are underground tunnels, explains Holding: some were used by servants as château access, others diverting the “megalitres of rainwater” from the roof. “Some are atmospheric and some are just a real hassle as the stone starts to fall down,” he says. We pass a partially collapsed wall, current repair quote: $130,000. “It’s eye-watering stuff,” he says. Built into this 38-metre-long wall are nine vaulted cellars. When Holding explored them last June, he discovered a bust of a chap with an intricately carved ruff. Didier later identified him as 17th-century French king Henry IV. Old postcards of the château show that he was once on the roof with a bust of Louis XV, which was found in the attic. “It’s a great mystery why they ended up where they were,” says Holding.

The view from the central entrance.Credit: Antoine Doyen

We head inside to the entrance hall, where the grand escalier winds its way upstairs. The couple live in a series of rooms, which includes a 1970s kitchen, to the left. Holding turns right, then through a door, and I see the huge French windows of the grand salon. Painted above head height are bucolic scenes and paeans to geography and science. In the bibliotheque, I see the grand piano where Selkirk learnt to play Elton John’s Song for Guy during winter. Behind a door is one of five steep, hidden staircases. Holding uses a rope that hangs in the narrow stairwell to get up and onto a mezzanine floor.

Here was where the servant for Achard de la Haye’s mother-in-law slept. I see the bell that Madame might have used to summon her domestic. On the first floor, Holding explains that a century’s worth of stag heads were once mounted along this brown hallway. The de Rochequairies offered to sell them to the couple. “We said, ‘Forget about it,’ ” says an unimpressed Holding. “It was quite creepy.”

We wind through a few more of the château’s 25 bedrooms, many in excellent condition (one is covered in beautifully preserved 18th-century wallpaper in blue arabesque). Selkirk’s tidy stacks of fabrics are in another. The other day, she noticed two tabs under a chaise longue. Lifting them, the chaise opened to reveal a cache of beautifully folded pieces of hand-stitched, 200-year-old fabric, and huge silk chinoiserie drapes.

Holding and Selkirk moving picture frames in the water-damaged former staff quarters, a 19th-century chair at their feet. Credit: Antoine Doyen

Up a less grand staircase to the second floor, the destruction is immediately obvious. “It’s like Apocalypse Now,” Holding says. “The further up the Mekong you go, the crazier it gets.” Wallpaper curls from walls, plaster litters the floor and the ceiling gapes in places. After a tour of his magical rooms of ancient toilets, etc, Holding ascends another dark staircase to the attic where buckets and barrels are everywhere. The couple find themselves here – sometimes at night – during heavy downpours. They reposition buckets and disgorge them from attic windows. “When it rains cats and dogs it’s just misery,” says Holding. “The water runs into the plaster of the ceiling below and then it turns into mush. Then it runs into the wall cavities and comes down the grand escalier. And that’s heartbreaking stuff.”

This summer has been France’s wettest in decades, leaving the couple desperate for the roof restoration to begin. “When it rains, you can feel this place deteriorating.” Holding points to where their neighbour and enthusiastic volunteer worker Jose de Penaranda recently fell through the roof, his legs dangling into the second floor. Later, they jokingly urged him to use the stairs, but it was, says Holding, “terrifying”.

Holding then shows me a large attic room with a vaulted ceiling and fireplace – odd luxuries for a space reserved for domestic staff. But Didier made an exciting discovery here: an 18th-century billiard table. These were often destroyed in the 19th century and Didier had seen only one surviving French model, in Sweden. “For me, it’s a kind of a treasury!” Holding found more table pieces and six cues in the attic. Studying the plans, Didier realised the mystery room was, in fact, the billiards room. More purpose-built furniture emerged, and Didier identified their place on the original plans. This, he says, will allow them to put back together at least some of the rooms as they were intended. “It’s extraordinary for me! Not only as an architect, but as an art historian.”

The tour ends and several days later, I’m watching Selkirk’s “Today at the château” Instagram stories (@chateaudepurnon) when a clip comes up of Holding taking a light plane ride – a birthday gift – over his estate on a glorious blue day. Lockdown seems grimmer than ever.

Holding and Selkirk at the back of their home. Credit: Antoine Doyen

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A week before the tour, I interview Holding for two hours, again starting in the French dawn. “I’m like a farmer now! The earlier the better.” When his face appears, I notice he has a farmer’s ruddy complexion – all that time outside over a French summer has bronzed him. And also: he seems happy. He doesn’t, by the way, have regrets about his political career. “I absolutely loved every day,” he says. He’s not moved to comment on Australian politics or buy into debates about his biggest project, the state’s controversially expensive desalination plant (this financial year Victorians will pay the private Aquasure consortium $570 million in capital costs and $77 million for 125 billion litres of water, despite storage levels being at 85 per cent). “I hope people will put things in their proper context and look back at what Victoria was like [during the Millennium drought]. I think, as with all things, time will tell.”

Purnon’s classification qualifies it for French government co-funding, but it also means everything requires enormous amounts of paperwork and scrutiny. “Everybody has their eyes on the project,” says Selkirk, “and we have to be very respectful of that.”

Sometimes Holding wonders what Australians would think if taxpayer money was given to foreigners who owned pieces of their national history. “My guess is Australians wouldn’t love it,” says Holding. But the French, he says, are thrilled “you’re dumb enough to put your own money on the line to save their heritage”. Didier says most French people would appreciate the couple’s “big energy” because these buildings need to be “loved by their owner”.

The budget for stage one – the roof restoration and fixing the facade’s crumbling stonework and faded shutters – is yet to be finalised but will exceed $3.2 million, with the state pitching in a little more than half (Selkirk sold her South Melbourne investment property to help fund it). Says Holding: “They’re the works the French government is most desperate to get done. Not doing that work will cause the château to fall down.” It’s also a time commitment: if you sell within 15 years of these grants, you must pay them back (Holding may do a few projects related to his previous skills, but the château is his career for now). Future stages will be part-funded by renting the château’s exterior for weddings and events.

The estate includes several other buildings.Credit: Antoine Doyen

Holding has found much joy in his discoveries, particularly the clues that château workers left behind about their lives. Craftsmen drawing their tools in the attic. Two men writing, also in the attic, about their love for the same woman. He’s also discovered a massive stone well and the glacière or 18th-century freezer (a hole in the woods where meat and fish were stored under layers of snow) which yielded “extraordinary quantities of shoes”.

When he first started château work, Holding says, it was like politics: he worked to get a job done. “Now I realise that work is part of the joy. You stop in the middle of something and look out across the field and back at the château and think, ‘Wow. It really looks quite nice.’ It’s fun and, in and of itself, really satisfying.” Wow, I think. The château has taught Tim Holding mindfulness.

Selkirk recalls some beautiful moments, like last summer when they dined on the back bridge and watched deer playing in the park. She also remembers with horror their stonemason presenting a large bag of bloody wild boar meat – an enormous trotter poking out the top – after a hunt in the forest.

One day, Selkirk’s friend messaged that buying Purnon seemed so romantic. That day, she was lying in the roof beams amid cobwebs, trying to fix a gutter during a downpour. “What on earth are we doing here?” she thought. The emotional, financial and time investment has got to be worth it, she says. Has it been so far, I ask? She laughs. “We’ll see,” she says, squeezing her semi-paralysed hand. “A year and a half is not enough time to tell.”

A first-floor bedroom used to store fabrics, including many of the building’s curtains. Credit: Antoine Doyen

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One night, Holding messages: he is working on the château while listening to Melbourne radio on his phone’s AFL app. Port Adelaide are thrashing his beloved Geelong. He’s devastated. Surely, I think, few château owners in history would tend to their estate while obsessing about a bunch of sweaty blokes chasing a funny-looking ball around an oval 16,000 kilometres away.

But perhaps, when the enormity of his “bonkers” COVID project hits him, footy is Holding’s escape from the château. And we all need a bit of escapism these days.

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