With my husband, I visited her on weekends, walking up the stony road from our house, the bottommost of the villas, to the cottage where she lived, on her second son's property: three dark, beam-ceilinged rooms, set between the chapel and a crumbling brick alcove, where someone had propped a wooden sculling shell from the sixties.
But what of the roof, which consists just of dark beams?
Inside, hops hang from dark beams, there are solid wooden pews and scrubbed pine tables.
The divider creates a bright, contemporary dressing area, a stark contrast with the dark beams along the ceiling and walls.
The setting, somewhat more contemporary than that in Beirut, has white walls, exposed brick and dark beams, and is decorated with Armenian artwork.
The apartments are single-storey and rustic in style, with dark beams criss-crossing ceilings and simple rugs softening black slate floors.
At the Pear Tree Inn nearby, also one of the Hook Norton Brewery pubs, festoons of hops hang above the bar, from the dark beams of the low ceiling.
Housed in 18th-century slave quarters, dark beams stripe the ceiling, local art adorns the walls, and wooden shutters shade the windows.
Along the hallway you can see the heavy dark beams that were part of the original construction, pitted with the marks of old chisels and embedded with seemingly ancient iron nails.
IT was a drizzly Sunday evening in the gray procession that was May, and Le Petit Chateau, with its imitation French-farmhouse facade of dark beams and white stucco, looked worn and faintly dispirited.
