Photography: Fiona Tomlinson
If Annabel Langbein were to choose her favourite word in the English language, “serendipity” would be high on the list. She loves the word both for how it sounds and what it means, with the trailblazing Kiwi food star able to point to many of those special yet unexpected moments that have changed the course of her life.
Falling in love with husband Ted Hewetson nearly 40 years ago would be the obvious one. But most recently, it was a serendipitous meeting with a French real estate agent that led Annabel to the start of an exciting new chapter in her already extraordinary life.
After decades dreaming of a bolthole on the other side of the world and eight years fruitlessly searching for the perfect place, she and Ted are the new owners of a farmhouse near Bergerac, in the southwest of France. And in April, they’re heading over to start what they hope is a happy new way of life. They’ll divide their time between their Wānaka home and Europe, where their children Sean, 33, and Rose, 30, live.
“It took us so long to find the right house. In the end, it was totally serendipitous that we found this one,” says Annabel. “It’s one of those things that come along and you just think, ‘Wow! How did that happen?’ We’re so thrilled we’ll be able to see more of our kids and we know how lucky we are to have this next chapter of our lives where we can both work anywhere. It’s very freeing.”
It’s been a momentous summer for Annabel, 67, who, as well as celebrating the French house purchase, hosted daughter Rose’s wedding to her longtime partner Hamish at home. The couple live in Portugal, but returned to Wānaka to marry on the family’s stunning lakeside property in front of 110 friends and family, many of whom also jetted in from abroad. Seeing fellow foodie Rose marry the love of her life was a deeply special milestone for Annabel.
“It was like someone had dropped a joy bomb,” she says, smiling at the memory. “It was sheer joy from everyone and Rose just never stopped smiling. I think we all felt privileged to be part of this wonderful love between these people. They’re a great match.”
Annabel and Ted’s hillside property was transformed into a magical venue for the nuptials, with a festival-style marquee, long tables set outside amongst the trees for the celebratory dinner and fairy lights strung above. It would be hard to imagine a more picturesque backdrop for a wedding and much to Annabel’s relief, the rain that fell heavily in the days before cleared just in time for the big day.
“It was sheer luck we got this little break in the weather,” tells Annabel. “The whole thing was so fabulous and so much fun, but Ted and I were exhausted by the end. You think, ‘Oh, it’s just a party,’ but there were a lot of moving parts, I can tell you.”
After all the action, Annabel is happy to take a moment on the sofa with a cup of tea to catch up with The Weekly. As she looks out the window across her incredible garden and the teal-blue lake below, she admits it’s hard to believe that soon she and Ted will be saying goodbye to their South Island retreat. Having their own base in France is the realisation of a long-held dream, and the couple is thrilled to have finally found a home in an area they know and love.
Located about an hour and a half outside of Bordeaux, Bergerac is a town Annabel discovered almost 30 years ago after visiting her good friend Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, a French cook who found fame as the first female to become the president’s personal chef. While Danièle sadly died last September, Annabel and her family would visit the pioneering foodie every year at her farmhouse near the village they now get to call home.
“I’ve got photos of Rose and Sean when they were maybe five and seven cycling around her farm, and I’ll never forget the first meal she made us there,” recalls Annabel. “She set the table out under this beautiful linden tree, there was guinea fowl and poached baby carrots with the tiny bit of the stalk still on them. In the kitchen, there were all these lovely white linen pillowcases hanging from the ceiling and in them were hams that she had drying. And the smell was that of violets from an intensely fragrant strawberry called the Mara des Bois. This was 25 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.”
While this all sounds incredibly romantic, Annabel laughs as she tells us the process of buying a home in France was anything but. After eight years searching – “We looked at about 80 different properties!” – they’d almost given up on the dream when they received an unexpected WhatsApp message last July from a real estate agent named Henrietta, whom they’d befriended a few years earlier.
“She said, ‘I’ve found your house. It’s not for sale yet, but it will be soon,’” tells Annabel, who learned the house in question was owned by Henrietta’s family friends and that she’d spent every Christmas there for the past 20 years. “Henrietta knew the house very well and was convinced we would love it. When we saw the pictures, we thought, ‘Oh, it’s perfect!’ If it weren’t for Henrietta, we would never have known about it.”
Annabel and Ted wanted to see the house in person, but before they could make it to France, they were told a US couple had been shown through by another agent and were very taken with it. They were forced to act fast.
“It was about one o’clock in the morning when we talked to Henrietta,” tells Annabel. “We’d had people for dinner and I have to admit, we’d drunk rather a lot of wine. She said, ‘If you want this house, you’re going to put an offer on it right now, sight unseen!’ So we did.”
With their offer in place, the couple flew into action, hastily arranging flights for the following week. Arriving in Paris in the middle of the Olympics wasn’t what they’d bargained on.
“It was complete chaos!” she laughs. “We had to get across Paris, and into various trains and subways, in order to get down to Bergerac. By the time we actually arrived, we were like two dead rats. We’d been travelling for 45 hours and we were just so shattered.”
And Annabel admits she was a little nervous as they approached the home they’d so spontaneously made an offer on. The property, which started life as a series of 17th-century barns before being renovated 22 years ago, didn’t have the long, tree-lined driveway or the grandeur Ted had been hoping for and was a little closer to the road than they’d anticipated. But with its charming interior, magnificent views, extensive gardens, high ceilings, stone detailing and six bedrooms, as well as a self-contained apartment, it had a lot to offer. And as soon as they stepped through the front door, they knew it was perfect. “We just looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, my God, this is our house.’ It immediately felt like home.”
Luckily, after meeting the owner and telling her how much they adored her home, she decided to sell it to Annabel and Ted rather than the Americans. Annabel is quick to point out, however, that this was just the beginning and that making it official turned out to be a complicated and at-times stressful experience. Annabel jokes that while businessman Ted is good at most things, he’s not a details man, so it was her leading the charge. Thankfully, her French is pretty sharp, which was helpful when it came to translating the 169-page sale document.
With the home now officially theirs, Annabel is busily planning for the next chapter. She and Ted have sent a container of furniture and kitchen equipment ahead of their Easter arrival, when they’ll meet London-based Sean, a doctor-turned-business consultant, and Rose and Hamish to christen the house as a family. For Annabel, the idea of cooking French-style meals for the people she loves in her kitchen on the other side of the world is almost too good to be true.
“It’s a very foodie area that still has a rhythm to it that’s like the old way of French living. People still cook in quite a traditional way, by the seasons. They all have vegetable gardens and the markets are amazing. It’s the home of foie gras, duck confit and all those really fattening things, so everything tastes delicious.”
Life is good, says Annabel, who happily reports she feels better now than she has in years. But she’s refreshingly honest about the fact it’s taken most of her adult life to strike the right balance. She admits she worked “far too hard” as she built up her globally successful cookbook empire. It wasn’t till four years ago, when she hit an intense burnout, that she realised something had to give.
“When I look back, I think, ‘How did I do all that work?’” says the author with who has sold over two million cookbooks. “For years and years and years, I just didn’t stop. Even when I had kids, I didn’t stop. Then I came to understand that if you run on cortisol for a long period of time, it becomes like a poison in your body. And that’s what happened. I got to my sixties and realised I felt really crappy. I was anxious and not myself at all. Things had to change and they did.”
Now, Annabel continues to work and is still conjuring up exciting ideas for new ventures, but instead of being focused on growing her business or increasing profits, she’s doing things that bring her pleasure. After years of being the boss, she’s learnt the joy of stepping back and delegating.
“Sometimes I say to Ted, ‘I’m not having to get ready for a meeting. I’m having to get ready to go and dig in my garden,’ and that feels so good. It’s very easy to confuse spinning wheels with forward motion. I always thought you had to do everything for it to be authentic and true, but I don’t feel the desire or need to control everything in the way that I used to. I’m much more prepared to listen and I’m much more interested in being collaborative. I’m better at trusting others now, which I’ve found is liberating.”
So, does that mean she’s retired? “God, no!” she exclaims. “It’s such a silly word, retirement. It’s so black and white to think that there’s a stop point. Look at David Attenborough. As long as you’re curious, open and ready to embrace something new, you won’t be old because your mind won’t be old. Curiosity is a very important thing to take with you through your life.”
And one look at Annabel’s kitchen tells us she’s not someone who is content just sitting around. On the stove is a pot of berry jam bubbling away. The bench is also piled high with apricots from their trees outside. Annabel has a busy few days of bottling and preserving ahead of her.
“It’s very satisfying, though, and lovely to have something to take to friends,” she enthuses.
She has also recently graduated from art school, where she studied ceramics for the past two years. Immersing herself in a new skill has brought her great joy. It reminds her of her mother, who was a talented ceramicist.
“The great thing about going to art school is I didn’t have to be good at it,” she explains. “I didn’t have to make any money at it. There was no pressure to prove anything to anyone with it. I could just do it for the sheer joy of it. Now I realise what a privilege it is to be able to do that.”
And the beauty of clay, Annabel says, is that the creations are yours to keep, compared to the ephemeral nature of food.
“You cook and then it’s gone,” she says. “But when you’re making something out of clay, you’re creating something that potentially lasts forever. I still have my mother’s bowls that she made 30 or 40 years ago. I like that timelessness.”
And as if that wasn’t enough, another string to Annabel’s bow is a spot of activism. She’s pleased to have the time now to give her work on the board of the Sustainability Council of New Zealand the attention it deserves. She has never been afraid of standing up for what she believes in. Right now, she’s gearing up “to make some noise” about the Government’s plans to lift restrictions on genetic modification.
The Gene Technology Bill, which is currently going through the parliamentary process, seeks to establish a new regulatory regime for gene technology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). And while some parties believe the current law, which was drafted in 1996, is out of date, Annabel and her Sustainability Council colleagues – including scientists Garth Coopers and David Williams, and Kiwi actor Sir Sam Neill – are concerned the bill is being rushed through without properly analysing the effects on the New Zealand food industry. She believes that medical gene technologies, which potentially have a lot of benefits, and food production, which in her view carries a lot of risks, are being lumped together in a single push to reduce checks on gene technology.
“I will stand up and make a noise about this because it’s important – it really is,” insists Annabel. “We need to have a proper debate, and the debate needs to be held with farmers, growers and exporters, not just people with a vested interest in the technology. We’ve spent decades establishing New Zealand as a premium food producer on the global stage. We’re jeopardising that if we don’t be incredibly savvy and seriously analyse what the risks are, and if needed, how we might mitigate them.”
Despite being so far away from her adult children, Annabel feels lucky to share such close relationships with both Sean and Rose, who has inherited her mother’s flair for cooking. When Rose returned home during the Covid pandemic, the pair teamed up to write a cookbook together, Summer At Home. The mother-daughter duo continue to work closely on a weekly subscriber newsletter and recipes.
“I love working with Rose in the kitchen,” says Annabel. “We cook the same way in the sense that we can finish each other’s food sentences and we can finish each other’s dishes. But I love the take she has on things – her food is so much more interesting. It’s really fresh, and she’s very on- trend in the sense of thinking about the way people eat and flavours. It’s very fun working together.”
And when it came to wedding planning, Annabel says she was delighted to help Rose, who works in communications and marketing for a US-based boutique hotel company, and fellow Kiwi Hamish bring their dream day to life. Their three-day celebration started with a family dinner on the Friday night. Then, the wedding was on Saturday, followed by a knees-up on Sunday complete with Argentine barbecue and live music. She says Rose was a remarkably calm bride-to-be in the lead-up. Despite there being so much to organise, stress levels were under control.
“Rose had such a clear vision for what she wanted. I thought, ‘Well, you’re only going to do this once, so why not make her dream come true?’”
And when Annabel made a speech at the reception, she took a moment to reflect on her own happy marriage to Ted, the man she wed in 1991 and whose support and love has been a cornerstone of her life.
“I talked about how I felt incredibly lucky in my life to have found a partner who has helped me to be the best version of myself and who I’m still crazy about,” she shares. “You’ll have ups and downs, and it won’t be plain sailing. But when you find that person to share your life with, it’s not one plus one equals two. It’s one plus one equals 10.
“I’m so happy for Rose that she’s found her person – Hamish is a wonderful guy.”
While marriage might seem an old-fashioned or outdated institution to some, Annabel still believes deeply in the concept.
“Ted and I always say it’s lucky we found each other. There wouldn’t have been anyone else who could marry us,” she confides. “We’re quite particular people. And of course you get pissed of with each other along the way, but that’s the nature of relationships. Being married is like a glue – it holds you together.”
And as they prepare for their exciting new chapter, where they’ll spend half the year in their new home, the iconic Kiwi food star says she still can’t believe their decades-long dream has finally come to fruition. When she sets to work in her new kitchen, she’ll be channelling her old friend Danièle, who led her to Bergerac all those years ago.
“She taught me what it meant to be a cook, which isn’t about showing off, being extravagant, and showing a whole lot of prowess in terms of technical skills and things,” tells Annabel. “Danièle said, ‘That’s what chefs do and they’re trained to do that.’ She said a cook is about your heart and it’s about home, and it’s about making people feel welcome. And she’s right – that is what we all seek to achieve.”
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