The French House of Your Dreams Is Lovely. Can You Sleep in It in July?

Yes, passive cooling should come first. Insulation, external shutters, trees, shading, appropriate glazing and sensible ventilation reduce energy use and often make a dramatic difference. But electricity in France is exceptionally low-carbon. In 2025, more than 95% of mainland French electricity production came from low-carbon sources, principally nuclear and renewables, according to RTE.

So we are no longer dealing with quite the same environmental equation that existed when air conditioning was inefficient, electricity generation was dirtier and summers were less extreme.

What does all this mean when you are looking at property?

It means I would now treat summer comfort as part of the building assessment, particularly in southern France.

If a house already has effective air conditioning, good. Look at what kind, where it is installed and whether it genuinely cools the parts of the house you will use. A single unit in the living room is not terribly helpful when you are lying awake upstairs at three in the morning contemplating your life choices.

If there is no air conditioning, don’t automatically reject the house either. Some traditional stone properties perform remarkably well. Orientation matters. Elevation matters. Trees matter. The thickness of the walls matters. So do shutters, roof insulation and nighttime ventilation.

But ask the question.

Could air conditioning be installed easily? Where would the external units go? Would planning restrictions apply? What would a proper system cost? If the property is in a protected historic setting, could the installation become complicated?

Ten or fifteen years ago, I regarded those questions as secondary. Today, I don’t.

And there is a resale consideration too. Foreign buyers from hotter parts of the United States already tend to regard air conditioning as normal infrastructure. British and northern European buyers are becoming considerably more heat-conscious as their own summers change. French attitudes are changing as well.

A wonderful stone house can still be wonderful without air conditioning. But “wonderful except for July and August” is becoming a less convincing sales proposition.

Perhaps that is the bigger lesson. We sometimes carry an image of France in our heads that was formed twenty or thirty years ago: shutters, lavender, warm evenings, cicadas and absolutely no vulgar machinery humming discreetly behind the rosemary.

Keep the shutters. Keep the rosemary.

But when you are spending several hundred thousand euros on your future life in France, make sure you can sleep there too.

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