Would you like tea? Tea or coffee? Let’s have tea. Let’s have it in the salon,” beams Angel, flame-red hair, bright lipstick, a hipster Marie Antoinette by way of Essex. “Welcome to the château. Sit, sit. Make yourself at home.”
The early autumn light pours in through the shuttered windows (duck-egg blue), bounces off the antiqued walls (cream), and squirms into every vintage, cushioned corner. Ivy tumbles from sconces. Flocks of fake butterflies rush up the double staircase (candles, more ivy), past two unicorn heads.
A tray arrives and Angel, 45, pours. Her husband, Dick, 64, whose moustache puts Tom Selleck’s in the shade, purrs his support from an upholstered armchair (canary yellow). Petale, a Kerry blue terrier, pads and wags about.
So far, all civilised. No swearing or bullying for which — allegedly — the couple hit the headlines in 2021 and again in May (more of which later). For now it is business — and it is a business — as usual.
I am in the heart of their Château de la Motte Husson love bubble on a moated island in the Pays de la Loire. And I’m being love-bombed by possibly the most famous British exports to France: the Strawbridges.
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The UK can be divided into two camps: people who have never heard of the Strawbridges or their Channel 4 hit series Escape to the Chateau (or are too snobby to admit to it), and those who adore them, believe they are on first-name terms with the couple, their two children, Arthur, ten, and Dorothy, nine, and know everything about the restoration of their “forever home”, a 19th-century mansion on the site of a 12th-century fortress.
“I like old things, that’s why I like Dick,” Angel says.
Fans from all over the world — the show has aired in more than 50 countries — queue at the end of the drive in Martigné-sur-Mayenne for a sighting or a selfie. Others send art.
In a narrow corridor somewhere between a turret and a standalone copper bathtub, I now know what it is like to be surrounded by dozens of Dicks and an equal number of Angels. Everywhere you look are portraits of the couple and their home, in ink, oil, watercolour, embroidery. There’s even a mosaic of the château made from a smashed vintage teacup. The skill level ranges from the exceptional to the sniggeringly awful.
“We love them all,” Angel says, caressing a chipped vintage mannequin given to her in Australia and carted back to France. “It came with a lovely kimono. I love a kimono.”
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“We do end up paying an additional billet at the post office,” Dick adds. Not everyone gets the postage right.
The couple found small-screen fame in 2016 after they swapped life in Southend-on-Sea for France along with a camera crew, and spent £300,000 on a fly-infested, abandoned pile with no running water, no heating or plumbing, peeling wallpaper, resident bats and just one plug socket. No one says “and we’ve got electricity now” with more enthusiasm than Dick.
Ever since, roughly three million people have tuned in to more than 50 episodes of them fixing up the property with 45 rooms, 16 fireplaces, 59 windows, 85ft chimneys and 12 acres — and try to pay for it all. For a sense of scale, the roof and render set them back £140,000. They have “worked their socks off”, Angel says.
Their schtick is a blend of the confessional and a sort of homemade, homely narcissism. It is a well-crafted narrative and they know their roles. He’s an alpha male and she likes getting her own way. She loves a spreadsheet, he is concerned that he hasn’t written poetry in six years. They are relentlessly upbeat and seem able to cope with significant setbacks, deadlines, Brexit (“fine, just more bureaucracy”) and 3ft internal walls while bringing up young children, a gaggle of geese and a handful of hens.
Their latest book, The Château — Forever Home, just published, is their most honest and heartfelt yet. There is more on their story, their traditions — oysters at the seaside every Christmas, a toast before every single meal, spending new year’s morning in bed being thankful and then making an annual to-do list — the isolation of lockdown and family losses and loves, interspersed with craft projects: Dick makes exterior seating from car tyres, Angel shows how to make gloves from old socks using a zigzag stitch to add a fur trim.
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It is all about living — and funding — a multigenerational dream that is hard-wired into their love-at-first-sight relationship. This is a husband who pickles the leaves from the magnolia trees he planted for his wife’s 40th birthday to use in homemade sushi — prepared with his Kai Shun sashimi knife from Celebrity Masterchef.
Lunch in the family kitchen with the children is relaxed and chatty, the table piled with plates of baguettes, cheeses, charcuterie, salad and pickles. Food is important to the family. There is no sign of a mobile phone. We drink a toast with 2 per cent cider. Life in northwest France is, in Arthur’s verdict, about “good cheese and good people — in that order”. Riveting stuff, but is it all too perfect to be true?
“When you think about it, it’s amazing how this all came about,” says Dick, who constantly seems surprised at his good luck.
He has a point. Separated by almost two decades, Dick and Angel are from different countries, generations and geographies (he is a country boy from Northern Ireland, she is a town girl from Essex) and yet their “eyes met across a crowded room” at a party in London in 2010 and the wooing with vintage stockings and goose eggs began.
Born in Myanmar, formerly Burma, in 1959 — his parents met on a boat to Pakistan — Dick grew up as one of seven children in Co Antrim before serving 20 years in the army, witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a manoeuvre few could have predicted, Lieutenant Colonel Strawbridge MBE, also an engineer, left for a career as a “telly tart”, first appearing on Scrapheap Challenge in 1998. Later he starred in It’s Not Easy Being Green with his first wife, Brigit, and their children, James and Charlotte, sharing the family’s tips on living an environmentally friendly life. The show was set in their Cornish smallholding and ran for three series. He and Brigit split up in 2010.
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Angel was born in east London and raised in Essex. She started collecting vintage crockery, cutlery and ornaments from the age of six — and now owns about 10,000 pieces — many of which have come in handy in her party and events business, The Vintage Patisserie.
“We both knew we had met someone truly special, and knew that we were going to have children together,” Angel says. “I wasn’t getting any younger. We didn’t hang around.” She has a point. Arthur was born in 2013, Dorothy in 2015. The couple also married in 2015 — footage of which later appeared in the finale of series one of Escape to the Chateau — having spent four years searching for the right property after deciding to move to France during a holiday to Carcassonne in 2011. Along the way they had viewed “tens of thousands” of properties online and 80 in person before they ended up in a trophy home of kings and nobility — which had been built in the 19th century as a love token for Countess Louise-Dorothée de Baglion de la Dufferie. The Strawbridges are the custodians not just of the turreted, moated château but a stable block (where they host weddings, yours for about £30,000 for three days with 80 guests), multiple barns, a pig shed, a moat the size of six Olympic swimming pools and a giant walled garden.
On a whistle-stop trot around their home, Dick winks, cajoles and gathers me into his orbit and ushers me around from the botanical suite to the boudoir, then the honeymoon suite — but not before he has made me understand the substance underpinning it all by opening the cupboard to show me the plumbing. “It’s not sexy, but it’s so important. I think Ange gets it now.”
They seem sickeningly happy. They touch each other — a lot. Dick is almost always “my love”. Angel is Angela, Ange, darling, and is “just gorgeous”. “There’s so much passion in our worlds,” Dick says.
“One of the reasons I fell madly in love with Dick is we both like to suck the marrow out of the bones of life,” Angel adds.
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Standing in his office, possibly the only room that Angel “will never” decorate, Dick shows me their original plan to fund the work, written in 2014 after they found the château but before they got the keys. On an A1 piece of paper are scribbled ideas ranging from a B&B, books, TV and, er, hosting build-your-own-rocking-horse weekends. Television was somehow inevitable.
“We both thought our adventure might be an interesting one to share,” Angel says. “It really was fate because the first time we brought a camera person with us was when the château found us. As Dick’s mum says, if it’s meant for you, it won’t pass you by.”
However, in spring the bubble looked as though it had burst when newspaper reports repeated bullying complaints that had first surfaced in 2021. Tapes of Angel were leaked online — recorded several years previously — when she had exploded with anger at a producer, calling him a “f***ed-up little c***”. Another report detailed a moment when Dick told a producer “f*** you”.
Channel 4 said: “Following a review, we took the decision to not work with Dick and Angel on any new productions.” Two Rivers Media, the production company, added: “We can confirm that we will no longer work with Dick and Angel.”
The Strawbridges issued a statement in response: “There are two sides to every story and from the incredible support we have received, most of you know that.”
Today, sitting in the shade of the pergola on the edge of a lawn, they calmly deny they were dropped by Channel 4. They also say that they made the decision to stop filming Escape to the Chateau in 2021 and informed Channel 4 by email in January 2022.
To their fans they have written in their latest book: “When the Chinese whispers started we said to you, let it go . . lovers will love, haters will not be converted, but you guys know the truth.” In the book’s acknowledgements pages they thank the ground TV crew, Sean, Miles, Tom, Jonathan, Ash and Chloe, “for the love and laughs we have shared and for always being there for the family. Thank you.”
When I ask Dick about the complaints, he says: “We had the most amazing nine series and finished all our commitments. It didn’t really make sense to us. Escape to the Chateau had finished on a wonderful high. There was no story. Nothing really happened. We’d stopped. We didn’t necessarily understand what was going on. We weren’t worried about it.”
And yet. Despite the wholesome image there is still an edge. “Mediocrity comes from compromise and we don’t compromise,” Dick says. “Both of us are headstrong. When it comes down to finding the best way forward we keep going until it’s right. That’s why every single thing in our lives has to be right.”
“I’m incredibly proud of who we are, our integrity and our team,” Angel says. “We are protective. People who come in have to remember this is our home.”
Dick, ever gallant, adds: “Can you imagine? You’ve met the lioness with our cubs. It’s a family. This is our family home.”
The couple are resolutely British but say they have no plans to move back. Their French is faltering, while their children are fluent. “We are insular,” Angel admits. Dick adds: “We’re not really plugged into the world like that. We don’t think of ourselves as famous The way we behave as a family, the standards we set for Arthur and Dorothy. It’s so simple.”
Maybe it was just time to take their home away from the screens and make it truly private.
“The decision-making we do is very much about what is best for us and the family,” Angel says. “Every year we ask, ‘Is it going to be all right for the family?’, ‘Is this going to work?’ You’ve met Arthur and Dorothy now. They are still young, but Arthur starts senior school next year. And they have different pressures on them with social media and everything else.”
The couple have closed their castle company, Château-de-la-Motte-Husson Limited, but their other businesses remain open. There’s the bedding, wallpaper, scented candles, blinds, oven gloves, those cushions, gin inspired by the walled garden and, for Christmas this year, a room spray.
This is not mere cashing in, they say, but Angel’s side of the deal. “It took absolutely years to find the time to do that. I’ve always had this ambition. All we’ve done is move here, and this is now the inspiration — sunflowers, pumpkins, the wildflowers, the château.”
Threading through every conversation are references to family and innocence, to making magical memories. “Arthur and Dorothy have a house with a new roof and all the big bills are sorted. That’s one of the things we’re most emotional about in the book,” Dick says, almost welling up. It’s a reminder that living such a dream comes at a cost. It also requires help. Angel’s parents live 10ft away in a converted barn and Team Château, a dozen-strong assortment of “can-do” handymen and women who can turn their hand to almost anything required — from damp-proofing to puttying a window or bringing tea — live nearby.
Work does not ever seem to stop. “There’s a tennis court we haven’t even done, there’s room for a treehouse over there that will be amazingly beautiful,” Angel says. A typical evening will entail the couple sitting in bed working on their laptops, each with a glass of port.
Their TV career may be over, but if you thought they would go quietly, think again. After all, their show must go on. Along with the book, there’s a UK tour and, now perhaps inevitably, a podcast. Dick and Angel’s Chat-eau (“See what we’ve done there?”) recorded in their newly converted attic, a room that neither their wedding guests or viewers have seen. The celestial sky bar is high up (112 steps, triple that if you forget something downstairs) with disco balls bouncing off the silver insulation and neon pink bar signage: “It’s my spiritual home,” Angel says. “Recording the podcast is going to be our date night.”
Dick says: “It’s a very unedited and raw thing that we do, when we talk about a week with recollections and anecdotes and answer questions sent on email. For us to sit down and have a chat is fun.”
But do they ever argue? Please say you do. “All the time, every day,” Dick says. “But you’ve got to be passionate and we are both madly in love, so there’s no point getting hung up on silly little details. If you asked me what we argued about yesterday, I’d have no idea. Argue every day and drink gin at night with a smile.”
The Château — Forever Home by Dick and Angel Strawbridge (Seven Dials £22). Order a copy at timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount for Times+ members. Dick and Angel’s Chat-eau is available from Wednesday on Global Player; thechateau.tv
