All of the ‘Castle Impossible’ Renovations Daphne and Ian Have Completed in Season 2

Several years into their tenure as the latest caretakers of Chateau de Lesigny (and two seasons into Castle Impossible), Ian and Daphne Fig are well aware that restoring an ages-and-ages-old property is the project of a lifetime rather than a flight of fancy. That said, they’ve made monumental changes to their home this year — and it’s welcoming two family members. We’d say the chateau is now officially in its Ian and Daphne High Renaissance, and we’d love to show you the hallmarks of the era.

This second-floor room was notable mostly because it was such a bummer. A massive oak beam in the dining room below it was cracking, which necessitated unlovely, wall-spanning pulleys that would secure it to another massive beam via this room (above). “We can’t take the pulleys out, but we can create a bookshelf in front of them and hide them,” Daphne explained. And as it happens, “one of the main things that our chateau is lacking is a big, beautiful library.”

“Because it’s so much taller than it is wide, it could have that library vibe,” Ian noted.

“This room is right in the heart of that chateau, so it deserves to be a magical space,” Daphne said. “It’s on the second floor close to four renovations we completed last year: the royal bedroom next door, the playroom, our offices in the bureau and salon, and the chateau bathroom.” Turning this space into a room that would attract new photo shoot business would help finance ongoing maintenance and future revenue-generating renovations.

As they investigated the wall behind the pulley, the Figs discovered that it wasn’t anchored at the top or bottom and would need to be completely rebuilt. The half-room and staircase behind it were likely once used for storage … and had serious potential as a unique mezzanine, if they opted to lower the height of the library’s bookcases a bit and give that half-room above it a balcony that opened to the other space. “Unusual features will help the feature stand out to clients looking for a photo shoot location,” Daphne noted. Bonus: They could create a secret door in the bookcase that would lead to the staircase and the new mezzanine beyond it.

Though the newly created library looks like it’s been here for centuries, it’s the decidedly contemporary product of Ian and Daphne’s ingenuity. They gathered assorted pieces of rococo furniture Daphne’s grandfather had tucked away in storage decades ago, then combined and painted them a uniform shade of deep, moody green to create the look of cohesive, room-spanning woodwork.

The new shelves’ books were a fortuitous neighborhood find, and Ian brought $600 worth of them home at 50 cents a pop. (That budget-friendly find was especially welcome in light of their elevated taste in wallpaper: Covering the top portion of this room set the Figs back $7,600.)

The room’s story continues on the newly created mezzanine, where Daphne used a portion of the intricate, swan-patterned fabric that had been covering the walls to reupholster a chair that’s now at the sitting area’s antique desk. The iron railing at the edge of the space, in turn, had been rusting away in a neighbor’s yard; for $200 and a bit of elbow grease, it became an elegant way to disguise the visible part of the pulleys that still run through the library.

After drilling a hole and using a fiber-optic camera to determine that the room’s featureless ceiling was in fact a cover-up for these dazzling beams, Ian and Daphne carefully demolished the drop surface and restored this feature — which dates back to the 1600s — to its former glory. “I literally feel like we just found treasure!” Daphne crowed.

The ceiling had a gap above the fireplace where the original artwork was missing, so Ian painted a panel to cover the gap in the style of the original design. He researched the coats of arms for Magnus (that is, Daphne’s grandfather’s last name) and Martini, his Italian family name, then incorporated them both in his work.

After many years of living on her own in Paris, Daphne’s grandmother decided she wanted to be closer to family — and informed Daphne and Ian that she would like to move to the gatehouse beside the renovated hunter’s lodge where they lived. At 860 square feet, the two-story building was a good size for a single occupant; it was also more than 400 years old, had no toilet and had been abandoned for at least 20 years. “I don’t think she realizes how much work still has to be done on that place, and I don’t know that she can afford it, but I do know that we can’t!” Daphne said. Granny was willing to contribute $120,000 of the $150,000 restoration project, and Ian and Daphne covered the rest.

When the renovation started, the plan was to break off the render on all faces of the gatehouse to reveal the stonework underneath. As Ian and Tony (a master craftsman who has assisted them in their renovations and become their dear friend) removed that render, however, they discovered that two of the building’s faces were stonework at the bottom and colombage — or timber frame that’s infilled with brick and stone — at the top. “Problem is, in the past someone’s rendered over the upper section with a very strong sand and cement mix,” Tony explained, “so as we’re trying to break that off it’s destroying all the timber frame.”

The solution? Creating new colombage for the upper portion of the gatehouse with green oak. “As it dries out, it will slightly crack and shrink; it’ll silver down with the weather [and] it’ll look original,” Tony said.

Daphne chose green paint for the exterior window frames to match the windows on the hunter’s lodge, and Ian re-created ornate woodwork for the relocated porch (which will now shelter Granny from the rain as she’s coming and going through her front door).

“Before we took on the gatehouse, it was in a miserable state,” Daphne said. “We managed to give the house a real cottage feel. It was a big risk uncovering the render — we didn’t know what we were going to find — but we’re so happy with the result. I even love the brickwork of the chimney stack; it tells the story of the history of this building.”

Prior to renovations, the garden behind the gatehouse was nothing more than the less-than-lovely parking space for a gas tank that supported the hunter’s lodge. The Figs installed wooden fencing that blocked off that eyesore, gave Granny a place to hang plants and created an intimate back patio for entertaining. Its very first, very special occasion? A sunny lunch where Daphne and Ian told Granny and Tony that they would be expecting a baby in the summer!

While the gatehouse’s exterior was ready for its close-up in relatively short order, revamping its interior was a far more convoluted project. The second-story floors were in such sorry shape that they were unsalvageable, and black mold was everywhere. The good news? Since the gatehouse’s neglected innards had to be removed, Ian and Daphne were free to reimagine it in a new and idealized configuration. They decided to pare the second floor back to a single bedroom and bath at the rear of the building, then let the front portion of the building soar two stories up, all the way to the ceiling. Replacing the ceiling joists at the rear of the building would cost an additional $4,000 on top of the $150,000 budget, but the Figs promised to cover that unexpected expense — and they did their best to reassure Granny that the change of plans was in everyone’s best interest.

The downright spectacular ceiling that greeted Granny when all was said and done proved Ian and Daphne right, to everyone’s immense relief. They inherited the space’s stately antique chandelier from Tony and his wife, Sharon, who passed it on from their own bedroom as they downsized from their sprawling farmhouse in Normandy. The second-story window across from the mezzanine is at eye level with Granny’s bed, and the Figs trimmed the trees in the front of the gatehouse so that she can rise each morning and look straight out and across the property to the chateau.

While you can’t see it in the photo, this cozy living room owes its handsome and level tile floor to Ian’s dead sprint back to the chateau to grab an additional bag of screed, the runny, self-leveling (and exceedingly quick-drying) material he and Tony spread here. The handsome oak beams now supporting the floating chimney stack, in turn, are floor joists they were able to salvage when they demolished the original second story. There’s a flap for little Charlie, Granny’s black-and-white cat, in the front and back doors. “If Charlie’s happy, then Granny’s happy, and if Granny’s happy, then I’m happy,” Daphne said.

The spacious new kitchen at the rear of the gatehouse beneath Granny’s bedroom culminates in exposed timbers en route to the private patio and a cat tree Daphne rehabilitated for Charlie. “We have so many materials just sitting around,” she said. “Since I was a little girl, my grandma would often be working on fixing something up if it was an old leather chair, rebinding a book, sewing up pillows — and I feel like if she hadn’t instilled that value in me, I might not have worked with the chateau in the same way.”

Daphne and Ian weren’t surprised when Granny selected this serene Graham & Brown mural wallpaper for her new mezzanine. “I think your grandma misses being in the south of France,” Ian observed.

“Yeah, they built a house together, my grandma and my grandpa. They literally just went and spent two or three months every summer on the French Riviera,” Daphne replied. She complemented that seascape with a Louis XV bed upholstered with periwinkle-blue fabric and a flush-mount pendant with sparkling golden petals.

“Daphne and I got the perfect housewarming gift for Granny: it’s a toilet from the future,” Ian explained. (This housewarming gift rang in at $3,170.) “It warms your butt, washes your butt, dries your butt — you don’t even need toilet paper! We just need to figure out how it works.” As a second high-tech grace note, they installed a lift that would carry her from the ground floor up the stairs to her bedroom; both technological marvels delighted her. “I do feel like between this and the smart toilet that we got for my grandma, she should be busy all month,” Daphne noted.

Speaking of updated facilities, might we direct your attention to the fine-but-nowhere-near-chateau-worthy powder rooms Ian and Daphne decided to tackle while Tony was preparing his house for sale and they paused the renovations in Granny’s gatehouse? These his-and-her spaces were the chateau’s ground-floor accommodations for wedding guests, and they did not inspire selfies. Their plumbing was also starting to leak; it was high time for them to both function properly and complement the Figs’ spectacular special-event spaces.

The tile that carries through the chateau’s first-floor hallways now elevates the powder rooms as well, and complementary wallpaper murals make the two spaces feel related rather than identical to one another. Ornate, solid stall doors provide both privacy and warm backdrops for guests at the vanities, while gleaming brass pedestal sinks with glass shelves tag in for the gone-and-hopefully-forgotten wall-mounted plastic paper dispensers. Last but not least, tall, intricate tiles mimic the look of wainscoting beneath the new murals.

Each powder room now has a chandelier moment, complete with new-but-antiqued plaster medallions. Every last surface in these reimagined rooms is now both useful and beautiful.

After a rainstorm revealed that the first-floor terraces above the chateau’s medieval fountain were leaking water into its lowest level — a serious structural problem that threatened the fuel tanks they stored on that level and would cost an eye-watering $93,000 for specialists to fix — Daphne and Ian got to thinking about the spaces that adjoined those terraces, and how they might be adapted to create new revenue streams (that would help absorb the blow of that structural fix).

A film crew had painted this 415-square-foot room gray, and it was one of the first-floor spaces made available as part of their wedding-rental business, right beside those powder rooms they’d just renovated. What if it could be more than that, though? Daphne imagined it as a standalone salon de thé, or tearoom; “It can also be booked for, like, a birthday, a baby shower,” she explained. “You can book a room without having to book the whole chateau.”

Daphne chipped off a bit of that gray paint and found that, beneath the white paint her grandfather had used in the same space, the room appeared to have been pistachio green — and she was delighted. She’d envisioned a pastel tone that would channel the insouciant aesthetic Marie Antoinette had brought to Versailles in her day, and that dessert-worthy hue was just the thing for a space she intended to fill with infusers and macarons. Ian, in turn, found a company that could reproduce pictures on plaster affixed to mesh and create the look of frescoes with any image; after taking an extended photo safari around the chateau and sending off 70 images of paintings Quentin Varin (1584-1626) had created on the property, he received reproductions he trimmed and affixed around the room to spectacular effect.

The tearoom needed to be both opulent and versatile, for it would be reconfigured every time a new group rented it. Daphne and Ian met that challenge by “Frankensteining” two pieces of furniture to create this massive tea-service storage unit, then paired and painted two tall glass-fronted cabinets to extend it even more on either side. “We put wheels on the heavy furniture so we can rearrange the tearoom based on the event,” Ian explained.

It hurt to spend so much on future-proofing the leaking terraces, but when the money was gone and the work was done, both Ian and Daphne were surprised and delighted by just how beautiful the newly paved spaces (complete with their names etched on the underside of a central stone) turned out to be. They refurbished a vintage ice cream cart ($200) and painted it the same pistachio green they’d used in the now-elegant salon de thé; it was the cherry on top of their expansive new event space.

Ian felt the history of the moment: “When they go to redo these terraces in a thousand years, they’ll look at this and be like, 'Wow, a thousand years ago…’”

“‘…The Figs were here, and they did this!” Daphne replied.

As for the rest of that medieval foundation, which Ian and Daphne called the dungeon, couldn’t they be making better use of that space as well, now that it wasn’t leaking after storms? Ian zeroed in on a portion of the space that had direct access to a staircase leading to the chateau’s front exterior. “I mean, come on. This is the perfect place for a medieval tavern,” he declared.

“You’re not wrong,” Daphne said. “This space just has so much untapped potential; it’s really exciting — but we will only have weapons on the wall out of reach.”

“I think one of the only places in the chateau that’s haunted is the dungeon,” Ian noted. “Daphne says there’s no such thing as ghosts; I say it’s pretty haunted, which is why it’s the perfect place for a tavern.”

Inspired to adopt traditional carpentry methods, Ian created a banquet table with a 10-foot slab of oak from Tony’s farm in Normandy; he created X-shaped trestles to support it, with more of the oak joists salvaged from the gatehouse renovation. He and Tony sourced the barrels for the smaller tables from a bar in Lesigny (for $90 apiece) — and the smell the wine-soaked wood emitted when they cut them down to chair height gave the room “that tavern smell.” The pitch-perfect, wrought-iron chandelier? Just $200. “Something that always blows my mind is that you can find really amazing antiques in Europe and they’re just a fraction of the cost that it would be in America,” Ian said.

The bar counter’s oak slab comes from the same tree that supplied the plank for the banquet table, and its reclaimed Parquet de Versailles face is a few floor panels Ian and Daphne kept aside after renovations in the chateau. Ian carved the travertine trilobe (a common shape in medieval architecture, popular for its representation of the holy trinity) on the bar after a lesson from Thierry (a stonemason he met at a medieval festival in Brie-Comte-Robert, a town five miles away); the dungeon ghosts are going to love that, no? After budgeting $15,000 for the transformation, the Figs spent just $10,800 to complete their tavern.

As wedding season unfolded and Daphne’s due date drew nearer, Daphne and Ian focused their attention on relocating the chateau’s bridal suite. The romantic chamber they’d created adjoining their own living quarters in the hunter’s lodge was a big hit with their clients — but its soundscape was in for a major evolution over the summer. “I think now is the time to create a new bridal suite that is separate from our home so our clients don’t have to wake up at five in the morning when our baby starts crying!” Daphne said.

Built in the 18th century to house hundreds of pigeons raised for meat and eggs, this dove tower had the potential to become a new signature space for the chateau. It was also a giant cylinder full of niches that suited actual birds, not metaphorical lovebirds, and transforming it would be no small feat.

The dove tower’s unique shape and character would be fabulous selling points once it was fully habitable for humans. As unrenovated accommodations, on the other hand, it was a doozy.

“Spatially it’s a disaster, because you have a giant cylinder room, so you’ve already lost like a quarter of the space,” Ian observed. No right angles? So many problems.

“Circle rooms are so hard to work with,” Daphne agreed. “And it doesn’t get enough light! We’ve got one window that goes between two floors!” Those walls were a meter thick, so punching between them wasn’t really an option.

The Figs decided to turn the tower’s ground floor into a sumptuous spa space where couples could relax before and after their nuptials. Borrowing a move from the gatehouse they’d completed for Daphne’s granny, they’d then remove half of the ceiling between the second and third floors to create a mezzanine bedroom above a cozy living area — and clear sight lines all the way up to the spectacular original ceiling. Those updates plus building in a new sewage system, electrical lines, plumbing and heating would ring in at an estimated $140,000 — and it all needed to happen in just three months.

The series of steps that spiraled around the tower was one of the features that lent it fairy-tale charm, but it had been neglected for decades — and replacing it entirely would have cost $40,000. Instead, Daphne and Ian coaxed it back to life by brushing off layers of moss, replacing and repairing individual components as needed, then giving the wood a coat of linseed oil. “It’s almost like putting a moisturizer on really dry skin,” Tony explained.

On the body of the tower itself, moisture and ivy had worked away at both the cement and the lowermost iron band, helping it retain its round shape. Tony and Ian removed the rendering and re-pointed the stonework beneath it to shore up the lowermost portions of the building.

The all-important, bespoke spiral staircase that rises between the second and third floors was a hefty investment at $19,500, but Daphne and Ian knew that leaning into the dove tower’s curves and repeating its spiral motifs was the most meaningful way to honor its aesthetic authenticity. The tower’s hexagonal tiles are its original flooring, and the portions the Figs removed in creating the mezzanine won’t go to waste, of course; they’ll wait in the hangar until Daphne dreams up a second life for them in a future restoration. The time-consuming task of repainting the pigeons’ niches and filling 300 of them with candle bulbs and beeswax sleeves (an electrical installation that was $14,800, all told) proved worthwhile when they used the dimmer switch and the tower came alight at last. As they’d imagined and hoped, the space is truly breathtaking.

Daphne stumbled upon fragments of a marble fireplace surround that ignited her imagination, and she asked Ian to reassemble them with epoxy resin for the electric installation they’d purchased for the dove tower’s living area. Sure, its proportions were far beyond what the little hearth would need, but that was part of the fun. “Some of the charm of the dove tower is having some things that are bigger than normal and smaller than normal,” she observed. “It just kind of adds to that fairy-tale, Alice-in-Wonderland feeling.”

Speaking of marble moments, the first-floor bath is now the spectacular new home of the weighty, book-matched marble slabs Ian and Daphne removed from a bathing chamber in the chateau a year ago. When the spa space they’d envisioned for the first floor became too costly and time-consuming to undertake before their baby arrived, the Figs decided to put that project on hold and make upgrades to the initially simple space they’d envisioned for the main floor. That meant they were able to invest $500 in these washstands and $3,750 in a magnificent soaking tub that echo the warm veining in the marble feature wall.

“A circular bed is the most efficient use of space in a circular room, but it’s also a special feature, cozy and romantic,” Daphne said. She framed the new bridal suite’s sleeping area with a pair of intricate sconces she found among her grandfather’s salvaged pieces and restored with care. “Antique lights are so unique and so wonderful, and oftentimes we turn away from them because they don’t work anymore, but in reality all that really needs to happen is that they need to be rewired.” Ornate globe pendants echo the room’s many curves and complete the space’s transformation.

A starburst of massive oak beams in the tower’s topmost portions enables an original-to-the-building rotating ladder to swing around the walls and reach each of the walls’ niches. Guests who enter on the first floor now look up from the living space and have sight lines that soar to this ceiling.