We weren’t even particularly thinking of France,” says David Linley, by way of explanation as to how he became the chatelain of a “rich Marseilles businessman’s country retreat” in the Luberon. “But then Serena met Peter Mayle at a lunch.”

The author, whose mutual misunderstandings with the locals in nearby Ménerbes put Provence on the map for British property buyers, introduced the Queen’s nephew and his wife to a “discreet” estate agent, and in 1999 they paid a reported £800,000 for a handsome 19th-century hunting lodge on 650 rugged acres with views of the Vaucluse mountains.

Since then, the Linleys have had their own Mayle moments. When a lorry driven by two Irishmen and containing a load of garden furniture from Linley’s interiors company got wedged in a bend up the steep track from the main road during a rainstorm, Raymond, the resident handyman/caretaker, was summoned. He declined to assist on the grounds that he was in his pantoufles (slippers) — an attitude mirrored by a Linley design colleague from London, who wouldn’t get out of the car because he was wearing Gucci shoes. The local fire brigade and a large crane eventually saved the day.

Controversially, before acquiring the bolt hole near the understatedly fashionable village of Gordes, Linley had sold his mother’s Caribbean holiday haven for a reported £1.5m. Princess Margaret had given her son Les Jolies Eaux, her house in Mustique, a few years earlier, and the media were strident with anguish on her behalf at having been deprived of her winter retreat.

But the empty landscapes of Haute Provence, hazy in the summer heat, are more to Linley’s taste. He says the area reminds him and Serena, the daughter of wealthy London landowner and property developer Viscount Petersham, of happy childhood sojourns in, respectively, Scotland and Ireland.

The buying process was complicated, he recalls. “The French owners — 16 people we bought it off. And now we also own a strip in someone else’s field. Very curious inheritance laws here.”

Suddenly, the “i” word hangs in the air, heavy with the recent press excoriation over the auction sale, by Linley and his sister, Lady Sarah Chatto, of their late mother’s possessions, to meet inheritance-tax obligations. But he resolutely won’t speak of that, and turns the conversation to estate management, French-style.

“I’ve been a carpenter until now,” is Linley’s description of being boss of a furniture, interiors and design company that has two central London stores. “I’ve always loved making things and designing things, and this is a large design project really. And I’ve always wanted to farm.”

The four-bedroom, three- storey hunting lodge and the three-bedroom guesthouse have had the pinky-brown plaster walls restored (“You can tell round here when a house is grand, because there’s plaster on the outside, not just bare stone”) and sky-blue shutters fitted. They have been made comfortable with a mixture of Linley pieces and local arts and antiques. Nearby L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a sort of town-sized antiques shop, has been the source of good finds.

Newspaper cartoon originals featuring Linley’s parents in the 1960s hang alongside a document showing the arms devised for David and Serena (Viscount and Viscountess Linley) when they married. Noël Coward’s old straw hat is among the jumble on the pegs in the boot room.

The kitchen’s new gas range is working at last — they barbecued fish in a wheelbarrow while waiting for the repair man to call — and the pool terrace is girded with wrought iron made by a local craftsman. The next part of the project will be the restoration of the estate’s original 18th-century farmhouse, but in the meantime it is the land that occupies Linley’s French leave.

Most of his Provençal domain is wooded, the occasional tree bearing the traditional metal chasse gardée (no hunting) signs, but Linley allows the locals to shoot as the previous owners did, as a “good neighbour policy”. It pays to follow local custom, he has found, making a judicious switch to a sandy boules pitch after the English croquet lawn was “snuffled up by wild boar”.

The fauna are not the only problem. “Being a countryman in France is an entirely different prospect to being a countryman in England. One becomes obsessed by rain down here. One of our fields is called Three Wells, but there’s about enough water to wash a baby, and that’s it.”

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