Published by New York Review of Architecture
Words by Kay Wisnowski
Illustration by Sandy Christ
Today’s story comes from the New York Review of Architecture, a big, clever, funny publication that reviews architecture in New York. (It also features New York things that have nothing to do with architecture, and architecture that has nothing to do with New York, as you’ll see here.) Charting the rise of so-called ‘renotainment’, writer Kay Wisnowski shows how castle DIY first went big on TV, then migrated to YouTube, creating a new breed of chatelain hustlers, all selling their own particular visions of the good life in the French countryside.
Five years after deserting his post in the British Army, Billy Petherick spent 2014 raiding forty-odd churches across Northern France. Entering during normal operating hours, he used a crowbar to pry open locked chests holding chalices, tabernacle keys, and other religious artifacts. His French girlfriend, Gwendoline Mouchel, heiress to the Lesaffre yeast fortune, remained in their Porsche, operating as a lookout or, as she later told the court, playing on her phone and writing her marketing dissertation. Her partner, she later offered by way of explanation, “did not have a high opinion of the Church.”
Two years after the heist, Billy and Gwen spent €1,050,000 on Château de la Basmaignée, a neo-Gothic hunting lodge without electricity or running water in the rural region of Pays de La Loire. The Russian couple who previously owned the estate – complete with a private chapel, six cottages, and sixty acres of parkland – had left it in near ruin. But between Billy’s limited building experience, the artistic vision of his brother Michael, a network of British tradie expats, and Gwen’s fabulous wealth, they believed they had the raw materials at their disposal to resurrect the crumbling manor. Their hard work paid off when the popular British Channel 4 reality TV show Escape to the Château: DIY caught wind of the renovation and, in 2018, featured their project in a few episodes.
Eventually footage of Billy redoing the mortar on his chimney arrived at the desk of Captain Daniel Lawlor. On his return to the UK, he was promptly arrested, charged with desertion, and dismissed from the Household Cavalry. He managed to stave off jail time until 2024, when French authorities found some of the stolen pieces on eBay, leading the Rennes public prosecutor’s office to trace about eighty artifacts to Billy. After paying a €25,000 fine – and after Billy spent three months behind bars – he and Gwen continued, and do continue, to renovate their château and recently acquired convent, filming their progress for the family’s small fiefdom of YouTube channels (Billy’s The Pethericks, Michael’s Doing It Ourselves, and the third Petherick sibling’s Sadie in France). You, along with millions of others, may find yourself watching Billy in his beautiful château with his beautiful chatelaine, and you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?