Dreaming of a Classic French home

I have many clients looking for a classic old house with a mature garden. These properties are getting scarcer but they are still coming onto the market. Good ones are snapped up very quickly, but even the best ones need work. This work can be expensive and a full restoration project will be many times more than the cost of building a new luxury villa.

The properties most people coming to France dream of living in are old, traditional, stone built houses, mostly from the 19th century or earlier – I know – when we came to Languedoc in 1992 we first bought a 19th century “whip factory” near Spain and then our 10th century ruin in Nizas. In both cases there were thousands of hours of work to be done, I had been involved in the building industry in the UK and understand and have experience in most building trades so I had some idea of the work needed. It was awesome, but at least the initial investment in the properties was very small compared to todays prices.

To be honest, I would not take on the same projects now – OK I am 15 years older, but the costs are higher, the initial investment is ten times what it was and, to me, the arithmetic just does not make sense anymore.

Here is a letter I sent today to a client I am trying to help find their “dream” home in France – I just checked, so far we have exchanged 153 emails, it is all part of the service and I value his business and am determined to help the best I can – let me know if I can help you too.

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Hi Jim,

A “project” like the one you showed me yesterday will cost a great deal more to get into shape than building new – from five to fifteen times the cost in my own experience and the “project”, in reality, will never be finished and will never be viable.

All work on stone houses is massively expensive to bring up to modern standards of building and comfort – seriously, to get that property yesterday into good shape is more than 1.5 million euro of work – this is why they are frequently abandoned and for over 50 years have laid neglected, the French have simply built new at a fraction of the cost.

In the last ten years many of these “projects” have been bought by people coming into this area – their size and location is just too attractive, many people have lost a great feal of money in taking on these projects.

My own house was bought in 1999 by the previous owner and was clearly very run down because when we bought it in 2003 the vendor gave us over 400,000 euro of certified invoices for the remedial and building work that he had paid for. Add to this the original cost and the time, interest charges, inconvenience etc and clearly he lost money – the work was about three quarters finished and ours is not a big house and was permanently lived in and not in bad repair originally.

These “projects” are dreams – and in most cases should remain so lest they turn into nightmares.

There are charming old houses coming onto the market, in good condition, which are good value – they are scarce (as you have found) and often will never get as far as being visible on the Internet as they are sold quickly.

I agree, a modern villa on a lotissment seems boring, but this is the “real” French way of life here. After twelve years in a crumbling medieval ruin with me working continually to keep it from collapsing – our dream too was to buy a modern villa – we only bought our present 19th century home because it has ample ground floor accommodation for my Mother and we do love it dearly (as I do my Mother) – but although we joke that one day we will down-size into a mobile home park – we know that the true cost of owning anything built prior to the mid twentieth century is several times the cost of a modern house.

For another client I found the perfect Maison de Maitre last week – 525,000 euro, perfect – but would you believe the original roof slates had been replaced by felt squares, I would not even put these on a shed in the South of France – a massive replacement project (I am glad I climbed onto the roof for him to confirm my suspicions)

We are continually looking for the right house for you.

Best wishes

Tony