House #20: Quercy tower

"S", convinced that we won't find what we're looking for in our budget in the region around Lodeve, did some digging online, and sent us on a roadtrip to Aveyron and the Tarn, two states a little farther northwest. So we went up into the hills to see some houses in a different part of France.

No, this isn't the house we went to see. I wish. And let this be a lesson to anyone who has dreams of being an estate agent: if you want to impress clients with the properties you have on offer, don't impress them with your very own castle first. Sort of dulls the shine of what's to follow.

This magnificent 4-towered chateau is the home of Don and Ian, a British couple who decided some years back to move to France, rehab a castle to an amazingly high standard, and then sell lesser properties to others. Inside it was a dream, beautiful furniture and glorious volumes of space, cannons and great stone spiral stairs, even a chapel complete with regalia. In the picture you can see a chain running up three stories to a bell mounted under the tower window... that's their doorbell. Just yank the chain.

So after seeing that, you can understand our relative disappointment in the house they showed us to buy:

According to Don and Ian, back in the day (makes you wonder which day) this was a classic quercy tower-style house, and the primary landowning house of the area. Whoa. Times were hard, I guess. Back in the day.

But to be fair, it had suffered in the meantime. The verandah, which must have been quite nice once upon a time, had been usurped by a tiny and bizarre exterior bedroom. The first floor, which could have been a great open kitchen/dining area, had been partitioned into three lesser spaces, including two bedrooms. This was because the original bedrooms had been eliminated by the greatest indignity of all: the original topmost floor had been completely removed and replaced with an atypical and unattractive roof. The top windows had been bricked up, and the new attic, once a full story, was in shambles, with bare roofing-tiles overhead, and new flooring a necessity. Too bad.

Here's a picture of what it once would have looked like:

Of course all these things are restorable, but for a price. The beams seemed in good shape, but knocking out walls, adding a story, and roofing can be some costly business.

And when you get down to it, the footprint of the house, it being a tower-style house, was relatively small. It was a vertical house, while I personally prefer flat open spaces. So the way they had enticed me around that problem was with the grange, a barn attached to the house's side. But this feature had been ruined, in my opinion, by a recent attempted rehab, some ghastly work with cheap modern materials which had completely robbed it of its charm.

Again, restorable of course, but that's a ton of work to do. We'd want to rebuild pretty much the entire top floor of it, and roof it all classic-like. And get rid of the cinderblock interior, which I won't bother to show you. The ground level was two small rooms with great thick stone walls. Not much we could do to them. Alas.

There were things we liked about this property. We liked the age and history of it. The vast fireplace (which was of course for cooking as well as heat) was really something.

We liked the gardens, explorably divided into pieces by hedges and buildings. We liked the little outbuilding, with its ancient roof and old bread oven. This would make a great outdoor summer kitchen.

And we liked all the land around the place. 1.5 hectares of it all part of the package.

But when considering the starting price of 163,000 euros and all the work that would need doing (minimum 100,000 euros, likely much more), plus the fact that we were out in the middle of farmland and surrounded by cows (and flies), somehow the place just didn't seem right for us.

Oh, and did I mention that there was no bathroom in the house? No, we want somewhere we can do work on, but I think we have to love what we start with. And this one just didn't do it for us.

Now, if Don and Ian's castle had been for sale in our price range....