This chapter is extracted from Joe & Kerry Laredo’s book: Foreigners in France: Triumphs & Disasters reproduced with the kind permission of Survival Books. This particular chapter relates to our contributing author, Londoner Martin Hills and his wife Julia. Having bought a holiday apartment in southern France they found village life a shock. It took them two more moves to find what they were looking for.

Picking The Right Place
Julia and I moved permanently to France about eight years ago. We are both Londoners, by birth and inclination, and so are essentially urban, if not indeed metropolitan, people. The significance of that was to emerge later. Today, we are both in our sixties. We are interested in politics and the arts and have spent much of our married lives buying and doing up old houses to our tastes - mainly because the houses we liked and could afford always needed renovating. Julia had given up her job to raise a family and so it was she who principally developed DIY skills.

We have moved house more than most people - partly because, once we feel we have got a house 'right', it lacks challenge; and partly because of a disinclination to put down roots.

Julia's background was scientific: she had been engaged in veterinary research. I, on the other hand, was and have been for most of my working life, in one form or another, a professional writer. Indeed I still am, writing for a number of English-language publications in France. For many years I ran a Fleet Street marketing communications consultancy, which meant working in and across the allied fields of public relations, advertising, conferences, exhibitions, publications and all that kind of thing.

Why France?
In our case, for a variety of reasons, there was never much doubt. For years we had taken all our holidays abroad. We preferred the freedom of driving and, given the existence of the Channel and North Sea, came via France. In the course of our touring, we covered most parts of France, making a point of not rushing through to the destination.

Another factor was that my business, which was highly personalised, didn't have an unlimited future, as long-standing contacts moved on or retired, to be replaced by younger people who preferred advisors of their own generation. While technology enabled me to dispense with secretarial staff and even an office, it was clear that we should prepare to live on a much reduced income, and we were well aware of the differences in property and living costs between France and England.

Thirdly, we had had to accommodate and nurse both our parents in their later years and we were determined not to saddle our children with that burden. Distance would help. On the other hand, our family remains in England and we wanted not to be so remote that visits in either direction would be too difficult or costly.

When, in the mid-eighties, we realised that we might be able to afford a holiday home abroad, the only question was where in France it should be. We considered somewhere in the north - we had become very attached to St Omer in Pas-de-Calais, where we had often stopped. There, we should be able to go over for weekends. Then we considered somewhere further south, like Dijon in Burgundy, which we also loved. That would probably rule out weekends, but could be reached without an overnight stop. We didn't then consider the south, because the distance seemed to preclude any but long holidays.

However, as retirement became increasingly imminent, we began to use our holidays to examine particular areas more closely and the changes in my working conditions opened the field more widely. We were also now taking into consideration the relative ease or difficulty of selling quickly should we decide to retire elsewhere.

It was on one of these trips that we first came to Var and instantly fell in love with the extraordinary scenery, carmine earth, mountains, vast forests, charming and picturesque villages, and - as we then thought - marvellous weather. I should also mention the light - you don't have to be a painter to see why the extraordinary clarity drew so many of them to Provence - and the smells: walks through the woods are inseparable from the pervasive odours of thyme, rosemary and all the other famous herbes de Provence. We were hooked.

On subsequent trips, we started to develop criteria. As city dwellers, we liked the contrast of country holidays and began assessing villages. The right one had to have a river. It must have a choice of basic local shopping, not just one butcher, baker or candlestick-maker. It had to have a sufficiency of bars and restaurants, from cheap and cheerful to places suitable for celebrations. We also considered seriously the financial side. If we weren't going to be there that often, could we let the place when it was unoccupied? Seaside places were easier to let, but they were more expensive and we would hate to be there in the height of the season. On the other hand, what would happen to our property in our prolonged absences?

Then, on a leisurely return from Italy, we happened on a leaflet describing the conversion of an olive oil mill into a small block of flats. The architect sent us a video and we bought off plan. The site was on a steeply sloping riverbank in Cotignac, a village we had already rated highly, a little north of the A8 motorway between Aix-en-Provence and Nice. At the rear entrance to the building, our apartment was at street level, but at the front, looking over landscaped gardens to the river, we were on the topmost two of four storeys.

The apartment had a large living/dining room, with cloakroom, kitchen and pantry off it on the lower floor, and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the entrance floor above. The stairs were against the two-storey rear wall, which was that of the ancient olive oil mill, and we had a south-facing balcony at the front. This had the advantage that, when the sun was low in winter, it penetrated the full depth while, when it was high in summer, the apartment stayed cool and shady. There was also a large power-operated skylight for through breezes.

A further advantage was that the deal included optional letting management, a facility comparatively rare at the time in inland parts of Provence.

Mistakes & Problems 1
Broadly speaking, the purchase went smoothly and, having visited the architect to choose details of finishes, we were able to arrange all the stage payments and completion without having to leave London. We had been careful to read up about French methods of conveyancing and felt quite confident that we needed no further advice. That was our first mistake. Well into the process we were told that planning permission for the original design had been rejected unless changes were made. One of these was that our large cantilevered terrace, leading off the main room, had been cut back to a small balcony.

We thought that this change would probably be sufficiently radical for us to pull out and get our money back - but we weren't sure and were reluctant to scrap everything and start over again. We regretted this later, as ours ended up the only apartment without a terrace and the disadvantages became apparent.

The next problem came when we took possession just before New Year 1988 to find that the floor and wall tile choices we had so carefully made had been disregarded and replaced with more expensive ones. This rankled and dented our confidence in the architect. The large terracotta floor tiles had been laid unevenly - we were told that this was the "traditional Provencal manner" and, with interior walls already on top of them, nothing could be done.

Worse, the essential treatment of the floor, entrusted to the architect's nephew, very much a non-specialist, were like a very old DIY joke. The boy had literally painted himself into a corner and the sole-pattern of his trainers was permanently imprinted the length of his exit route. Eventually the affected tiles were replaced at considerable inconvenience but, happily, at no cost to us.