The 20th of November 2025 was an ordinary Thursday. We were at home in the Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps, five hundred kilometres from the manor. Outside, it was cold. Inside, we were working on the next phase of the restoration.

Two months earlier, in September, we had signed the purchase. Egmont Manor, built in 1890, 420 square metres, herringbone parquet, marble fireplaces, a park of ten thousand square metres, had stood abandoned for ten years before we found it, by chance, one weekend when we had gone to visit Chambord. We viewed it, fell in love, and bought it.

The plan was precise: two hundred days of work to make the manor habitable, and the following summer, in 2026, to be married there. We were already married in the eyes of the law. The celebration at the manor would be the other wedding: the great one. The one we wanted to give our families, our friends, and ourselves, in a place we would have saved from oblivion.

By mid-November, we had finished clearing the roof and the timber frame. The roof had been redone, and the treatment for dry rot completed, literally the very day of the fire. Those were the biggest jobs, the most expensive and the most nerve-racking. We could finally breathe. The painful phase was behind us. What came next, the decoration, the furnishing, the bringing back to life, would be the enjoyable part, the one we had been waiting for since the beginning.

That Thursday evening, we had come home. The site was paused while the dry rot treatment took effect. Tomorrow would be another day.

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The telephone rings at 11 pm. I answer (Dimitri).

It is the gendarmerie. The voice is calm, professional. It tells us the manor is burning. That we need to come.

Our first reaction is disbelief. We think of a hoax, a wrong number, a mistake. Five hundred kilometres away, two months of work, a timber frame we have only just restored. This cannot be happening. Not now. Not to us.

We call friends who live in the area. We ask them to go and check. It is a strange request. We tell them it might be a hoax, that we hope it is nothing. We truly believe it. We want to believe it.

A few minutes later, they call back. The manor really is burning. The firefighters have been there for a while. The roof is ablaze. We need to come.

We take the car keys without a word.

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The drive took five and a half hours.

We left around midnight. We arrived at half past five in the morning. In between, empty motorways, petrol stops in deserted service stations, mile after mile of darkness in which we said almost nothing.

For those five and a half hours, we keep asking ourselves whether the timber frame has really given way. Whether the main rooms can still be saved. Whether the walls are holding. We make plans out loud, optimistic hypotheses. We reassure each other. We are wrong.

When we arrive, in the cold light of a November morning, it takes us a few seconds to understand that nothing we had imagined was true.

The roof has collapsed. The original timber frame, the one that had survived two world wars, that had been raised in the 1890s, that was the soul of the building, burned and then fell onto the attic. The attic fell onto the first floor. The walls are black. The windows have shattered in the heat. The ground is strewn with broken marble and charred wood.

The firefighters are still there. They have worked all night. The building was too isolated, the fire too fast. They did what they could.

The garden, though, is untouched. The trees have not burned, and the hydrangeas are sleeping through the winter, as they are meant to do. It is strange to see that beside the rest.

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We did not cry. Not straight away. First we walked around it, saying nothing, like two strangers in a place we knew by heart. Then we stopped. Then we cried.

And then, and this is strange to tell, there was relief. Not for the manor. For something else. No one was inside that night. Our cats were in the Haute-Savoie with us. No living thing was hurt. That is not nothing. When a material disaster strikes, you need that foundation to hold on to: no one died. The rest can be rebuilt.

The conversation we had at that moment, in the garden, is perhaps the most important of our life together. We are keeping it for ourselves. What we can say is that by the end of that conversation, we had decided.

We rebuild.

We rebuild because this manor stood for a hundred and forty years and it will not fall in two months. We rebuild because we cannot bear the idea of that timber frame, those mouldings, those old floors disappearing without our having tried. We rebuild because, in the end, the wedding will take place. Later. But it will take place.

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Six months have passed since that night.

Hundreds of thousands of you have followed us since. On Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, on Facebook. You have written, commented, shared, encouraged. We have read every message. We could not reply to them all, but read them, yes. All of them.

These letters are our way of telling you what the Reels and the short videos cannot. There, we show. Here, we tell. There, it is fast and visual. Here, it is slow and written. The two do not say the same thing.

We will write to you every Sunday evening. Sometimes about the restoration, sometimes about the craftsmen, sometimes about the insurance battles, sometimes about the garden, which keeps growing while we try to prepare the future of our manor, our Egmont Manor. Sometimes about things that pass through us and that we feel like sharing only with you.

It will be honest. It will be us. It will be slow.

We begin with that night because that is where it had to begin. Everything that follows depends on what happened on the 20th of November 2025. Not on the fire itself. On the decision we made in the garden, on the morning of the 21st.

Welcome to Egmont Manor.

Dimitri & David

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P.S. If this letter touched you, write to us by replying to this email. We read them all. We will answer as many as we can. That is what this place is too: a correspondence between you and us.