Lord Anthony and Lady Carole Bamford are saying, “Mi casa es su casa”—but in French. Which casa, you ask? Not their 1,500-acre Daylesford House, in the Cotswolds (where they hosted the wedding reception of their friends Boris and Carrie Johnson), but another property that’s just as storied.
A medieval estate with cylindrical towers—cozier than a castle yet far too grand to ever be called a cottage—Provence’s Château Léoube dates back to the end of the 14th century. It sits on Cap Bénat, a rocky coastal peninsula in Bormes-les-Mimosas, with sweeping views of a Mediterranean so crystalline it rivals St. Barth’s.
Château Léoube first belonged to a feudal lord, then passed through several families, including that of the French artist Émile Gérard. The Bamfords purchased it in 1997. “When we first walked into the house, we didn’t plan to do very much to it,” Lady Bamford explains, “but as we started to peel back the layers and uncover what lay beneath, we realized the scale of what we’d undertaken.”
The couple enlisted the architect Alain Raynaud to oversee a renovation that would stretch to 14 years. “Lots of people have said to me they would have felt overwhelmed by the number of decisions needing to be taken,” recalls Lady Bamford. But she views the experience as a sort of memoir, saying, “For me, decorating a home is about the stories you tell through your choices.”
That story is now the subject of a new illustrated book, Château Léoube: Provence Living, which takes readers through the painstaking remodeling of the house and then on to its rebirth as a working winery. Just a few years after their purchase, the Bamfords launched their first vintage, followed by sparkling bruts. Martin Morrell’s photographs of the re-awakened château—fresh, luminous, beckoning—make you feel as though you’re there. If only it were so. —Carolina de Armas
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at AIR MAIL
