Buying in France : the house comes second

A beautiful house can still be in the wrong place.

DON'T LET HOUSES CHOOSE FOR YOU

Most people looking to buy in France start with houses. This is completely understandable. Property websites are easy to use, endlessly entertaining and very good at turning a vague idea into something that suddenly feels real. You begin with a budget and perhaps three bedrooms. Twenty minutes later, you have saved a stone farmhouse in Normandy, a village house in Provence, a converted barn in the Dordogne and something suspiciously inexpensive in the middle of nowhere. The problem is not that you are looking at houses. The problem is that, in essence, the houses have started choosing the location for you.

An attractive property appears, and almost immediately the reasoning begins to work backwards. Perhaps we could live there. The airport is only an hour and twenty minutes away. There seems to be a town nearby. We could probably get used to the winters. This is the reverse of the way I think international buyers should approach France. The first question should not be: What property should I buy? It should be: What sort of life do I want to have in France — and where can I have it? That sounds like a small distinction. In practice, it changes almost everything.

START WITH AN ORDINARY TUESDAY

A beautiful house in the wrong place is still in the wrong place. You can renovate a kitchen, add a swimming pool or remove an unfortunate partition wall. Moving Montpellier closer to your house is considerably more difficult. So before seriously searching for property, I would begin somewhere much less glamorous: with an ordinary Tuesday. Not the perfect Saturday in June. Not the market followed by lunch under the plane trees, when you have consumed enough rosé to make the estate agent's suggestion of a ruined farmhouse seem unexpectedly sensible. Imagine instead Tuesday, 17 November. You wake up. What happens?

Do you walk somewhere for coffee, or get into the car? Where do you buy food? Are there people around? Can you have lunch locally? If you want to go out that evening, is anything open? Where is the doctor? Where is the nearest useful town? If your daughter announces she is arriving from Chicago on Thursday, where are you collecting her? If it has been raining for three days, does the life you imagined still work? That Tuesday often tells you more about whether somewhere suits you than the perfect summer Saturday. Everyday life is a much better test than holiday life.

YOU ARE CHOOSING AN ECOSYSTEM

And it leads to another important idea: you are rarely choosing a village in isolation. You are choosing an ecosystem. The village may provide the bakery and café. The neighbouring town may provide the supermarket, doctors and weekly market. The hospital may be 35 minutes away. The TGV station may be 50 minutes away. The airport may be an hour and fifteen minutes away. Restaurants, cultural life, friends, cycling routes, vets, pharmacies and everything else you actually use are distributed around you. Together, these things form the practical geography of your life. That geography often matters more than the village name itself.

This is why a charming village tells me relatively little on its own. One may have a bakery, café, pharmacy, restaurants, associations and year-round life. Another may consist mainly of houses, a mairie open a few hours each week and a church that has not heard from its priest recently. Both are villages. What matters is what happens around them. The same principle applies to regions. “Provence, Dordogne and Brittany” may sound like a shortlist, but often it simply means: these are the parts of France I know. That is understandable, but it is not yet a location strategy.

BUILD YOUR OWN MAP OF FRANCE

We all begin with a mental map built from holidays, books, friends, television and previous experience. But there is no particular reason the France you already know must contain the place that best suits you. A more useful starting point is not a list of regions, but a description of the life you want. Perhaps you want to live in France for nine months each year, on the edge of a lively small town, somewhere you can walk or cycle into the centre. You want countryside nearby, good healthcare within sensible reach and an international airport within about 90 minutes.

You may like restaurants and cultural life, want warmth and light, but worry about extreme summer heat. Now France can be tested against something real. Areas can be compared. Some survive. Others disappear surprisingly quickly. And occasionally somewhere you had barely considered starts to make much more sense than the place you had imagined for years. Then comes the stage buyers are often tempted to skip: test the place before testing the houses. Stay there. Wake up there. Drive the roads. Go to the supermarket. Find the pharmacy. Make the journey to the railway station. Do ordinary things.

TEST THE PLACE BEFORE THE PROPERTY

If you have a dog, find somewhere you would actually walk it. If cycling matters, cycle. If you imagine walking to dinner, try the walk from the residential areas you are considering. These journeys reveal the real geography of the place because they are the journeys you will repeat if you live there. A return journey to France is inexpensive compared with buying the wrong house. And throughout this process, there is one discipline worth maintaining: try not to let a beautiful property redraw your map. Property prices are very good at tempting buyers to abandon decisions they have already made about location.

You may decide you want to be within fifteen minutes of a particular town, then discover that your money buys twice the house forty-five minutes away. That may be a perfectly sensible compromise. But first ask what you are giving up. If the town, market, restaurants, healthcare or social life were the reason you chose the area in the first place, a cheaper house an hour away may not really be cheaper. It may simply cost you the life you were trying to create. Sometimes another nearby ecosystem can give you what you want for less money. That is a much better question to investigate.

THEN START LOOKING AT HOUSES

Eventually, after all this apparently property-free thinking, you do get to search seriously for houses. Only now the question is much better: What property will allow me to live the life I have chosen, in the place I have chosen? That is when property searching becomes genuinely useful. You are no longer looking at an attractive house somewhere in France and asking whether you could imagine living there. You have worked the other way around. You have narrowed the map, understood the ecosystem and tested the place. Now you can look for the property that fits the decisions you have already made.

France contains an extraordinary number of beautiful houses. Finding one is not usually the difficult part. The difficult part is finding the house that belongs in your France. A spectacular property in the wrong location can force you to compromise every day. A very good house in exactly the right ecosystem can become the perfect house surprisingly quickly. That is why the order matters. You have not delayed the property search by thinking about location first. You have prepared for it. Start with the life. Find the place. Then find the property.

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