Building & Renovation in France - luxury B&B

Jennifer and Helmut Gorlich are no strangers to the challenge of a refurbishment project, be it large or small. In fact to say that the Gorlichs are a pair of consummate professionals would be verging on understatement.

The couple have been doing up property for years, even before the concept of renovating and selling for a profit had even filtered into public consciousness, let alone become the fodder of countless TV programmes. To date, the French manoir, on the outskirts of the tiny Pas-de-Calais village of Gouy-St-André where they now live, is their thirty-second consecutive property in forty years.

When Jennifer first met German-born Helmut in 1967, he was visiting England to learn the language before moving on to France to do the same. At that time neither imagined that his planned move across the Channel would actually take place nearly thirty-five years later.

‘Looking back it’s certainly been a quite a rollercoaster,’ admits Jennifer. ‘We started out with a loan from my aunt of £1,500, which bought us a very neglected three-bedroom Victorian terrace in Tunbridge Wells. We spent the next few months doing what we considered to be simply administering some TLC – the idea of property renovation, unless you owned a stately home or a castle, was still an unusual idea back then – but when we sold the finished house for £4,500 we suddenly had capital, and we both realised we’d caught the bug.’

It was the beginning of an adventure that saw the couple renovating an amazing array of houses throughout the Weald region of southeast England.

‘We became a very efficient partnership,’ explains Jennifer. ‘I’d find a place with potential that I liked the look of and Helmut would go in and close the deal.’
Amazingly, during this period the couple were also pursuing their careers. Helmut, a hairdresser, had a salon in Hastings, while for many years Jennifer owned and ran her own antiques shop – and with her eye for classic interior furnishings, many of the keenly sought items that she shrewdly purchased during that time still surround them in their current home.

Even more incredible is the fact that their spectacular French five-bedroom property, which boasts several large reception rooms, stable blocks and extensive ornamental gardens, is actually Jennifer and Helmut’s interpretation of downsizing.

‘Our last property in England had ten bedrooms… but it was a hotel!’ Jennifer adds hastily. ‘It was right on the beach at Littlestone on the edge of Romney Marsh in East Sussex – a stunning location, and a spectacular Art Deco building, designed for the American actress Hedda Hopper. The architect was Sir Clough William-Ellis, whose most famous architectural endeavour was Portmeirion in Wales, where they filmed The Prisoner.’

Seaside glory

Needless to say, the couple soon breathed their magic into this faded piece of seaside glory, transforming it into a popular high-class hotel reminiscent of its 1920s’ heyday.
‘It was an amazing experience,’ Jennifer recalls, ‘but also incredibly hard work. With Helmut running the front of house and me pretty much single-handedly cooking and catering for our 36-cover restaurant, we soon found ourselves flat out seven days a week.

‘It was at that point, when we were getting too exhausted, that we’d hop across the Channel for a break, and we invariably ended up staying here in the Nord-Pas-De-Calais region simply because we were too tired to drive any deeper into France.’

However, the couple swiftly discovered that this often overlooked top corner of the country had a lot to offer, and it wasn’t long before Jennifer had spied out the perfect bolt hole – a small rural cottage near the coastal town of Le Touquet.

‘We spent the next two years visiting the cottage more and more frequently,’ explains Jennifer. ‘Finally we decided it would be nice to have something a little larger over here to spend a bit more time in, so we asked a local estate agent to keep a look out for us to that effect. What he came back to us with was details for something that sounded fascinating, if slightly bigger than we’d anticipated; a nearby manoir complete with formal gardens and its own stable block.’

So the couple headed off eagerly for an unofficial viewing, arriving at the property as dusk was
setting in.

‘I’ll never forget peeking through the wrought iron gates in the twilight,’ Jennifer recalls. ‘We were both totally bewitched by the place, and we knew we had to have it.’
And with that they returned to England, sold up, and became the proud owners of Le Manoir, officially moving in during the summer of 2003.

Although the property was in reasonable structural order, the large interior spaces were in need of a major overhaul. This task would have daunted many but not the Gorlichs who were by now veterans in the art of major refurbishment. They took the new project entirely in their stride.

‘We got some local French builders in to re-partition three upstairs bedrooms, the master bedroom and two further guest rooms, dividing the space to provide them with en-suite bathrooms,’ explains Jennifer, ‘but the bulk of our work here was mainly on the cosmetics. There was an awful lot of old Artex to be stripped from walls and ceilings, and the major reception rooms all had walls clad in the classic French style using heavy fabric, which can look fabulous, but in this instance had all been up for decades and was looking horribly tatty. Once it was down we decided that we were definitely going to opt for our usual palette of soft, light neutral paint colours rather than replace it.

‘We also re-carpeted nearly all the upstairs bedrooms and corridors with a neutral carpet of cream wool. But one of the nicest things about the house is the beautiful array of original flooring we have on the ground floor, from oak parquet to geometric patterned tiles. We really wanted the typically French original features and our wonderful curvaceous stone fireplaces to shine through in the rooms, which was another reason for keeping the wall colours plain.’

Elegant furnishings

These beautiful, interlinking interior spaces, with their high plaster panelled walls have been elegantly furnished by Jennifer, using a sumptuous mix of French and English pieces – antiques brought with them from their years in Kent, and brocante items acquired during their time here in France.

‘All the sofas came from the UK because Helmut finds French ones much too hard,’ laughs Jennifer, ‘but on the whole I like to think of our décor as a reflection of our lives here – having the best of both worlds.’

Once the bulk of the work restoring the manoir’s beautiful interiors was completed, the couple realised that old habits die hard, and rather than keep the property’s spacious splendour to themselves they elected to open it as a low-key luxury bed and breakfast concern.

‘After running a hotel there was nothing daunting about that decision,’ says Jennifer. ‘In fact it felt like the natural thing to do. It’s a large property and although we love having it to ourselves on occasions, we certainly didn’t want to be rattling around here all the time.

‘On the other hand we don’t overstretch ourselves here with lots of rooms and hundreds of bookings. It’s wonderful really because this time we’re doing it entirely on our own terms, making sure we never take so many guests at a time that we can’t offer everyone our very best service.

‘It’s an incredibly satisfying experience when people come to stay here and are so thrilled by their surroundings,’ she continues. ‘Not just here but in this region as they gradually discover all it has to offer. And I guess that as a package of property and location the whole thing works – it must do, because we certainly haven’t been short of return bookings over the last
few years!’