Au revoir, Londres
Single and in her mid-thirties, fashion editor Karen Wheeler hung up her heels to renovate a village house in rural France. Here she reveals what happened next
ILLUSTRATIONS PATRICK MORGAN
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with France. My first visit was a school trip. Unimpressed by the bread and cheese we were given for breakfast, I couldn’t wait to get back on the ferry home. Later, as the fashion editor of a national newspaper, I associated Paris with a morning-till-midnight obstacle course, trying to get to shows on time and being locked in total darkness in a dilapidated church with a scrum of well-dressed people and no fire exits.
It took Eric, French boyfriend number two, for me to finally fall in love with France. With him, I saw the country through different eyes. I was seduced by dimly lit dinners on the Left Bank of Paris and evenings spent cycling through fields of sunflowers on the Ile de Ré, a small, exclusive island on the Atlantic coast.
But my ultimate move there started with a car crash in Yorkshire.
Arriving at a writing retreat, I reversed my car into a stone wall as another attendee was unpacking his. It broke the ice as well as my rear light, but over introductory drinks we got talking further.
My new friend Dave – who, it turned out, worked for a well-known advertising agency – told me how he and his wife had recently bought a house in France. He described his property in Poitou-Charentes, central-western France, and the micro-climate that guaranteed more hours of sunshine than any other region after the Cote d’Azur, and I was hooked.
He ran the house as an informal B&B, renting out rooms to pilots from the local airfield. Before the evening was out I’d secured my invitation to visit.
As we drove past fields of smiling sunflowers in the early evening sunshine, I was looking forward to leisurely trips to the local café and market. What I was not planning was to buy a house.
But by Saturday lunchtime I had done exactly that. (Let me say at this point, that while the phrase ‘French house’ conjures up images of enormous villas, sweeping gravel drives and swimming pools, my house is a humble two up, two down with a small courtyard; it cost less than many would spend on a mid-life crisis car.)
A second chance meeting sealed my fate. Sitting outside the local café on Saturday morning, we met Victor, a local estate agent. Over une petite noisette (an espresso with a dash of milk) he casually mentioned that a house had just come up for sale in the centre of the village. I was all ears.
Half an hour later we were standing in front of a small house with tightly closed shutters and an ugly grey pebble-dash exterior. It lacked the potted geraniums, blue-grey shutters and other clichés of le style française, but somehow, I knew immediately I was looking at my future.
Inside, there was brown patterned wallpaper everywhere – a common characteristic of old houses in France, I’ve since discovered. (It’s ironic that the nation that gave us Monet should favour such truly horrible wallpaper.) Untouched since the 1970s, the house had no indoor bathroom, plaster was crumbling off the walls and the kitchen floor was rotten.
But I was instantly smitten. I fell in love with the narrow wooden floorboards, the original fireplace, casement windows and the adorable private courtyard. And, above all, the price. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said, not even stopping to think about whether the bank would lend me the money.
Fortunately, the bank did. With trepidation, 18 months later I packed up my London life – putting the Prada handbags, the dangerously high heels and the designer clothes into storage – and armed with a large book on DIY, a smattering of A-level French and all the enthusiasm of the clueless, I decamped to the land of the long lunch.
‘God, what a brave thing to do,’ is most people’s reaction when I tell them I moved to France on my own in my mid-thirties. With hindsight, I was not the ideal candidate to be renovating a house at all. Having spent most of my life as a fashion and beauty writer, my practical skills were confined to unscrewing lipsticks, and what I knew about DIY could be written on the back of a button.
Initially, I told friends I was only going for a year in order to oversee the renovation. More importantly, I figured that the house would be a distraction, having recently split up with a long-term boyfriend. If I’m being honest, I was also hoping to find myself a French husband (of my own, not someone else’s I hasten to add – although there is a lot of that sort of thing going on in rural France.)
I was worried that as a single woman and a foreigner, the locals might view me with suspicion. Astonishingly, they didn’t. Instead, they seemed pleased to see a fresh face. And as I battled through the winter without a kitchen or cooking facilities, my neighbours brought me homemade soup and slices of cake.
The secret to endearing myself to the local community, I realised, was to smile and say ‘bonjour’ to everyone – and, crucially, to do so when entering a shop or a restaurant (not to greet your fellow customers, I discovered, is the height of rudeness). I was already up to speed on the social kissing – two on the cheeks for a new acquaintance, three or four for a good friend or family member. I also knew that for a woman to fill her own wine glass is tantamount, quelle horreur, to tap-dancing naked on a table top. So I learnt to be patient and drink slowly.
Living in a village rather than a remote hamlet was a huge advantage, since I met most of my friends, both French and English, just sitting in the local café.
My house is fully renovated now, but despite the title of my book, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. There were many minor catastrophes along the way (too many to detail here). And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take some time to adjust to the snail-pace of French life. At first, on finding the shops closed for two hours everyday from noon – and all day on Sundays and Mondays – I worried I was too much of an impatient type-A personality to live here.
Even now there are things I miss: notably, Marks & Spencer food hall and decent cappuccinos made with fresh milk rather than the revolting long-life stuff. French customer service also leaves a lot to be desired: the general rule is that the customer is a crook until proven otherwise.
The bucolic French lifestyle is not for everyone. (Two years is said to be the average that most people who move abroad manage before the allure of the local bakery and cheap supply of Bordeaux wears off.) The winter months, when rural villages and life in general close down by 7pm, can be long and cold. It is easy to feel isolated behind tightly closed shutters and to miss the local pub or spontaneous trips to a wine bar with friends.
I’ve now lived here for four years and love being part of a small community, knowing my neighbours and having a vast expanse of unspoilt countryside on my doorstep. Sitting in my flower-filled courtyard on a summer evening, sipping chilled rosé, I feel enormously lucky to live here. And while I never did find myself a French husband, I did find a Portuguese boyfriend. But that’s a whole other story.
KAREN WHEELER, TOUT SWEET: HANGING UP MY HIGH HEELS FOR A NEW LIFE IN RURAL FRANCE, IS PUBLISHED BY SUMMERSDALE, £7.99
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