House #22: Ye Olde Inn

The close talker's house, though gorgeous, was easy to walk away from because we had such high hopes for this next one. It was really the online description of this next house that had mobilized us to come to the region at all; the others were to take advantage of th fact that we were here anyway. Here's the house:

Very cool. A big L-shaped structure, two conjoined houses actually, that once served as the town inn, and at a different time as the café. Sounds good. It's the kind of place that hasn't been so much built as it has evolved through the centuries, and has a strange ramshackle quality to it, rambling, asymmetrical. I love that kind of thing. 6 bedrooms sounds nice to me. Also, according to the website, there was 400 m2 of land with it, and as icing on the cake, another 1.5 hectares adjacent with a stone cottage thereon also for sale as a separate lot. The idea being that we could buy this house, and then my mom could buy the adjacent property, and we'd all share a yard.

Anyway, as I say, we had high hopes. Until we got there.

The first point I suppose I should note is that we actually had to do a bit of off-road trekking on foot to even approach the building. This wasn't by specific design, except the the house behind ours, which was Belgian-owned, had recently and literally collapsed under its own weight, requiring the road to be completely shut to all traffic lest falling bits of masonry or roofing should become an issue. So Derek and I hiked and climbed around the back side of the building, first down and then up a craggy hill full of nettles, in order to gain access. Not a good start. In this image, our house is behind the big tree, just past and to the right of the tape preventing us from safely continuing directly down the road to the front door. The collapsing house (with the wooden balcony) actually looks very sturdy from this angle. You'll have to trust me.

So in we finally got, and then unshuttered everything. Nice house. Very much what I expected, in a lot of good ways: the rooms proceeded from one to the next in unpredictable orders, and there were plenty of them. The place had a lot of wendy explorability, which is always good.

The fact that it was originally two houses also meant two separate attics and basements, which point I liked, and there were lots of interesting period features, like the big sit-in fireplace and the stone handbasin built into the kitchen wall. The rooms were spacious and bright, and it felt, more than many of the other houses we've seen, like it had a real history, a spirit, a shine. I liked it.

And in liking it, I suppose, I was willing to overlook many of the features that Sarah hated about it. First of all the garden, advertised as 400 m2, was something more like 100, if that. Also the village in which it sat was deader than dead, it was dead. I mean dead. Dead dead. No shop, no school, no activity, no people. Just crumbling buildings. Which isn't the coolest. And of course the carpet of dead flies in the foremost bedroom didn't turn her on so much either. Also the situation of the village, down inside a foresty canyon, made her feel a little walled-in by trees.

And there were things I didn't like either. The village and the garden didn't thrill me, certainly, but also as far as the house itself went. For example, you can see in this picture the sawn-off ends of what were once strong protruding beams sticking out of the building:

This was once a verandah, looking out over the verdant valley. Too bad. You can't replace something like that. A door high in a wall to nowhere.

Also, the adjacent land with the cottage was all the way down the hill and across the road. Not very adjacent in reality.

And the village was dead. I mean dead dead.

Kepler, I should add, did enjoy the house, because there were toys in it. But somehow that was not enough to sway us to cough up 150,000 euros for it, and so we yet again piled back into our cars and headed out, to view the final property of the day.