King of the castle

FRENCH RETREAT:Dubliner Karl O'Hanlon used to work for Bank of Ireland. Now he and his family live in Languedoc, where he has just opened a boutique hotel, holiday village and private members' club, writes RUADHAN MACCORMAIC, Paris Correspondent

KARL O’HANLON MUST have traipsed around 100 sites in Languedoc when he first scoured the region for the ideal spot for his then-embryonic hotel project a few years ago, but he reckons it took him no more than 35 seconds on the grounds of Château les Carrasses to know he’d found the one.

You’d wonder what took him that long. Standing on an elevated perch amid a rippling sea of vineyards that seems to stretch all the way to the Pyrenées in the south, the turreted castle is a beguiling sight. On a hot midweek afternoon, the cigales are in song, the scent of wild thyme is strong in the air and even the dozens of builders and staff rushing to finish work on the estate in time for its opening seem to be going about it with unlikely serenity. “We’ll get there,” O’Hanlon says confidently.

Originally built in 1886 on the foundations of a rest stop on the pilgrimage route of Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, the castle and all of the abandoned winery’s outhouses – the workshop, granary, grape-pickers’ refectory, labourers’ dormitories, gardener’s cottage and barn – were still standing when O’Hanlon bought the site in 2008. He and his small team have retained and restored each one and turned them into distinctive private living spaces which, together with a range of suites in the chateau itself, make up the 28 residences available to rent.

On a tour of the site a few weeks before the official opening on July 23rd, dozens of carpenters, painters and plumbers are hard at work all around us, O’Hanlon delights in the detail of their careful restoration, in imagining how the once-thriving estate would have looked and sounded. “This was the blacksmith’s house,” he says, pointing to one of the new apartments. “The blacksmith presided over this courtyard, which had the stables, the granary, his house and the pigeon-loft, the forge and the barn.”

“I think when you arrive here, you can tell that it was once a community . . . And I think that idea of community appeals a lot. It would have been a shame to take an estate like this and do away with that cultural heritage. So the idea was to preserve its raison d’être and to use that as the spring-board for reinventing it.

For the 39-year-old – an engaging, fast-talking Dubliner – this is the fulfilment of a plan that was long in gestation. O’Hanlon worked for years as a management consultant in London before he and his wife Anita returned to Dublin in 2000 and he took a job at Bank of Ireland. He recalls his previous career fondly, but the nagging desire to try something entrepreneurial, to find a way to indulge his interests in architecture and design, “to physically make stuff”, eventually led him to the south of France, where his father had long-standing connections.

With a local business partner, he set up a company that built small, upmarket hotels and larger, holiday village-style resorts. For a few years O’Hanlon balanced the job at the bank in Dublin with his building “hobby”, but in 2008 he finally handed in his resignation, set up his own firm and moved to Languedoc with his wife and children.

Château les Carrasses, built with the help of some private investors in Ireland, is the first of his lone ventures. He describes it as a hybrid concept that aspires to marry the best of a hotel, a holiday village and a private members’ club in one coherent whole.

The château and the outhouses have been faithfully restored and smartly decorated with neutral colours and furniture painstakingly hand-picked from around the world. “There’s definitely a clientele that likes old buildings and character but at the same time they want to be respected,” he says. “It’s very easy to find a very good, very expensive hotel – just like it’s easy to find a cheap, bad hotel. What’s hard to find is good, not-too-expensive places.” It’s sophisticated and luxurious, but you won’t find the word exclusive anywhere in the brochure. “I just hate that word,” he says.

The grounds of the estate include a floodlit clay tennis court, a barbecue area, a large infinity pool (10 of the residences also have their own private pools), a beach volleyball pitch, a winery and pétanque courts.

In the main building are an informal bar, a boutique and a bistro run by Anne de Ravel, a former food writer at the New York Times. “I’ve tried to avoid the idea of organised fun à la Club Med, but on the other hand to provide the opportunity for people to integrate and mix if they want to,” he says.

An extensive programme of activities, including French classes and painting workshops, is due to begin in September, while a wine school offering three- and four-day courses is also expected to attract visitors in the low season.

O’Hanlon speaks French, knows the region well and moves through the thicket of local politics and bureaucracy with a sure step. He praises the local mayor for his steadfast support and says he has had nothing but goodwill from the authorities, but every turn has nonetheless brought a reminder of the different business cultures between the two countries.

France being the capital of categorisation, the regional authorities are still wrestling with the dilemma of whether they can describe the project as a hotel. And he has also developed a keen appreciation of Irish service. “I can tell you, it’s a pleasure for us, when you have to ring the Irish passport office or somewhere else. It’s a total pleasure. People want to help you – even if their hands are tied and it takes time.”

Jotting down the timeline of O’Hanlon’s involvement with Château les Carrasses (found it in June 2008, bought it in November), you wonder whether he must have felt he had chosen the worst time in generations for a developer to be knocking on the bank manager’s door and “betting the farm”, as he puts it, on a single project. He admits that financing was tough and that it was “touch and go at times”, but thanks to some loyal investors and the “prudent but reactive” approach of the French bank CIC, the deal came through.

O’Hanlon is reluctant to cast public judgment on the domestic developers who have become totems for Ireland’s collapse. He has never built at home and feels ill-qualified to comment. But there’s one offence he will happily condemn. “I think building crap is unforgivable,” he says.

“I think, as a developer, you have a responsibility to build good stuff. That doesn’t necessarily mean expensive stuff. It’s easy to build a Taj Mahal for a billion dollars. It’s hard to build good apartments with €80,000. But I think it’s unforgivable to build crap, and I think there was some awful crap put up just to make some bucks. There’s a certain morality in all industries.”

We’re sitting now outside a cafe in the sleepy village square in nearby Capestang, where children are playing and a few locals are whiling away the afternoon. O’Hanlon gives me a lift back to Béziers to catch an evening train, and on the way he puts on a sample of the themed playlists he has put together for the iPod docks in each of the apartments. Yves Montand’s smooth baritone takes over as the vineyards flicker past and the empty road opens up ahead.

I wonder whether all of this meant a downward gear-shift after his days as a consultant in London. It’s the opposite, he replies. “This is much more intense. This is five in the morning to seven at night stuff. At the moment anyway. But luckily, this is an afternoon’s work.”

See lescarrasses.com. Opening rates are from €114 per night