Castles in the air: The Irish couple making a business out of French chateaux

It may have been inevitable that Dubliner Karl O’Hanlon and his wife Anita, who met while studying in University College Dublin, would end up doing what they do now. “Ever since we were kids – we’re together since we were 18 or 19 – we’d be driving around the West of Ireland wondering who owned this or that dilapidated mansion,” he says. “We were always very interested in old buildings.”

Following a move to France in 2006, the couple has renovated two châteaux estates (with a third due to open soon). The aim: to create spaces that are as focused on being welcoming and relaxed as much as they are on great service and beautiful surroundings.

But before that, there had been six years living in London and Oxford, where Karl worked in finance while Anita is a child psychologist by training. A return home to Ireland followed the birth of their first child in 2000 and with it a change of career direction. “We wanted to do something else,” Karl explains. “We wanted to do something that had a bit more of a physical manifestation. I didn’t want my career to be about slides.”

O’Hanlon’s father, an academic in UCD, had an interest in wine and through writing about the topic had a number of contacts in France. Karl and Anita started visiting the region, meeting people and looking for business opportunities. “We had our eye on the Languedoc region because we knew that it was very beautiful. Loads of gorgeous old estates, the wine was getting better and better and people were getting more and more interested in it as an area. At the same time, it was opening up in terms of the ability to get there as all the low-cost airlines were really starting to take off.”

After dipping their toes into various enterprises from Ireland, in 2006 they decide to make a leap of faith and moved to France with their young family. Some initial business partnerships proved disappointing but it was clear that the move had been the right one. “After about a year we realised that we were completely falling in love with the place, as an area and what it meant in terms of the kids and growing up here. So we just said, ‘Okay we’ll set up on our own’.”

The couple had an idea – the inspiration for which will be recognisable to most parents.

“When your kids are first born you go on your first holiday and discover that nothing works any more. If you go to a hotel you spend your time trying to stop the kids from knocking over the vases. Then you have a second kid and it’s one parent in each room with them. It doesn’t feel like a holiday. So then you try places like apartments or villas but the kids don’t meet anybody and if you want to go out to eat, one of you has to drive home. It’s nice for a couple of nights but then it feels too much like home.“

The plan, O’Hanlon explains, was to create the perfect alternative. “Our idea was to buy a wine estate and create something that broke all those compromises. Somewhere that had the facilities of a hotel, the practicality of a private rental, and the charm of a wine estate. And all that was packaged in the feel and service of a private club.”

If that description gives the impression that the aim was to create an exclusive destination, the very opposite is true. “Our idea was always that it would be very democratic,” Karl explains. “I don’t really like exclusive places. I find life more interesting when you’re surrounded by people who aren’t just like you. Who think differently than you do or live in different places and have different experiences.”

Decision made, the pair went looking for the perfect location and found it in April 2008: the almost abandoned Château Les Carrasses in the Languedoc. We walked on the site, the very first day, and said, “This is it, this is the one’.”

Armed with a passion for old buildings, design, food and wine, they set about bringing their dream to life. Karl had studied interior design at night and he and Anita gathered about them a great team. “It was a mix of internationally oriented locals and French people and then a ragtag of immigrants who knew how to do to do various bits pieces. There was a real spirit of the glorious amateur about it – it wasn’t ready when we opened so it was quite chaotic and a massive learning curve. And it was all quite a lot of fun – it was also a big hit, so that helped,” he laughs.

The château opened in 2011 and, despite the haphazard nature of the early days, was a success which prompted the couple to look around for a second property. Château St Pierre de Serjac opened in 2016 and while a little bigger, with a winery and spa, it was created around the same ethos.

“We wanted the properties to be at the centre of the local community. All the greatest moments in life are our moments of human interaction. From the most intimate, with a couple or family, through to the random stranger that you meet on the plane and spend an hour chatting to. We wanted our places to be somewhere where the local postman could and would be sitting down having lunch with an American hedge funder. We’ve always wanted them to be places where everybody feels comfortable.”

While the south of France is a paradise for antique hunters – perfect for the vintage accessories the O’Hanlons wanted for the châteaux – sourcing suitable beds and garden furniture within their budget was a challenge. “What we were looking to do was get classical French styles, and then adapt it for today,” Karl explains. A chance conversation with Marius Verwijs, founder of Kelston House, a Wicklow-based furniture company, provide the solution. He suggested that he and Karl go directly to furniture makers in Indonesia to cut out the middlemen.

It was an inspired move, it turns out, as châteaux guests began asking where Karl and Anita had sourced pieces in the properties and asking to buy them. What began as a bit of a cottage industry, getting pieces for guests, has now become a business in its own right. The recently launched Domaine Life (domainelife.com) is an online store selling furniture, art, accessories and antiques that are sourced for the châteaux. “It all grew organically,” Karl says, “but because Marius and I both had our own businesses, neither of us had the time to do it. Then Matt Salisbury, a guest actually, came to us and said, ‘I want to run that business’. And so that’s where it came from. I do all the design side of things, Marius does the manufacturing side and Matt then runs the show, but it’s all products that have been are used in the hotel.”

Karl and Anita source vintage art, herbaria, architectural folios and other antiques in Béziers not far from where they live. It is one of three centres of wholesale antique dealing in Europe and sees dealers from all over the world, including Ireland, buying and selling antiques. Another favourite spot is the Puces de Saint-Ouen flea market [known as Les Puces] at Porte de Clignancourt in Paris. They also source some piece in Ireland, and Karl gives special mention to Orior, a family-run furniture company in Newry previously profiled in these pages and Mullan Lighting in Monaghan.

“There’s so much good stuff happening in Ireland, I think that our business has been really influenced by that,” he says. “There’s something very democratic about Irish hospitality, and I do think that we’re absolutely brilliant at it [as a country]. From Avoca to the Cliff House to O’Dowd’s in Roundstone and everything in between. There are many places to be inspired by.”

It’s clear that Karl loves what he and Anita do and that democratic ethos infuses everything about the business. Rather than chasing offers of building a hotel empire, they have decided to, as Karl puts it, “go deeper”. The plan focuses on things like making the operation completely carbon neutral, upscaling their own produce, looking at the social impact of the business and offering leisure groups to guests. “I think business is often portrayed as people who don’t care about anything other than wealth and we just don’t believe that to be the case,” he says.

For now, as Karl and Anita wait to reopen when restrictions lift – and launch that third château – it’s evident the move to France 15 years ago was the right one. “We wanted to align what we love doing with how we made our living – and we’ve had the luck and the opportunity for that to happen.”

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