House #28: Monkey Business

From the outside, it was a feast of fantasy. An old monastery left to languish, awaiting a caring benefactor. More than a building, an edifice, massive, with towers and huge stone blocks. It made quite a second impression.

I say second impression because Sarah and I knew before we ever saw the building that we wouldn't want it. The first impression, ie the village in which it lay, was just too uninspiring for us to want to live there. It wasn't a very pretty place, it didn't have much commerce, it offered nothing in the way of visible action; it was a dead-end. But we wanted to see the monastery anyway.

We walked around back. Wow what a lithic structure. Nice windows, nice aspect. And backed up by enormous quantities of green land, farther than we could make out from ground level. We entered through the junked-up basement, stumbled up a darkened spiral stairway, and into the bright world of former monasticism.

There were a lot of rooms. So many rooms that I got tired of photographing them. Mostly, the rooms at the back of the house were empty save for some assorted junk, but in reasonably good shape. The light poured in. High ceilings, arched windows, bedroom after bedroom after bedroom. Some of them very ascetic-looking indeed.

Some of them had the remains of bizarre ritual in evidence:

But the rooms in the front of the house were in a little bit worse shape. They needed some basic elements restored, like, for example, floors.

This place needed a complete rehab. And it was huge. Then we went to check out the attic, via some very beautiful wood-clad stone-cut spiral stairs:

I won't bore you with pictures of huge beams and birdshit, which is pretty much all the attic had to offer, but it did allow a nice view of the yard:

Which was bigger than the house, but in better repair.

While up there, John asked me what I thought, if this building was just too much work. "No, not the building," I told him honestly. "If everything else were right, I wouldn't mind trying to make a go of a house like this. But we don't really like the village much, and that's a hard thing to change. There's just not much action here."

"I'm sorry, have you changed your brief? I thought you wanted a villge house. Is that no longer true?" This reaction surprised me. Here we were first thing in the morning, and John was getting shirty.

I explained to him that villages were fine. But that not all villages were equal. And this one was, in our eyes, less equal. He replied that 99% of French villages are essentially sleepy places where nothing happens. Great. Here he is trying to sell me a house, and telling me at the same time that I should not expect anything in the way of community or activity in my new hometown. But it stayed friendly, and while I tried to assure him that we'd seen enough of French villages to know that sometimes something happens in some of them, we locked up the monastery and walked back to our car, to check out some more reasonably workable properties in better locations. I hoped.

Too bad about the monastery. But it was cool to see anyway.