House #30: Charras

Oddly, we seem to have neglected to take an exterior shot of this house. So let me quickly describe it from the outside: a village house on the corner of a block in a quiet little town, very tidy. Looks like there's an old part three stories high in stone, and a newer addition two stories high in more modern (ahem breezeblock) materials. But all very clean and painted white with ivy. Ok let's go in.

Floors. Note to self: floors are very very cool and important. A floor can make a room. Some floors are so cool, furniture actually detracts from the room.

This was the first room, the kitchen, ground floor in the old part of the house. Perhaps you notice that all I show you is the floor. Nothing else was as cool. I mean it was a nice enough kitchen, if a little dark, but the floor is really the only important part. It's the traditional local floor style, very tactile and warm-feeling, a nice marriage of stone and wood. But then in the modern part of the same floor, a lounge. We move from ancient charm to sterile boredom. Also you can see, looking back at the kitchen, how thick the original walls of the house are.

Those tiles. Everybody uses those same tiles. And the wood cladding on the ceiling. I've seen too much of that as well. And the painted breezeblock walls. Don't even get me started. And is that lawn furniture? I'm going back into the old part of the house.

Upstairs, another old-style room, done in oak floors and red everything else.

Again, nice, and if we bought it of course, we wouldn't have to cope with the current owners' choice of furniture. But then again with the new part of the house. In this case, on this floor, the master bedroom.

The nicest part of this space was the floor, but it still couldn't compare to the old oak boards in the previous room. And somehow you can really feel the materials behind the paint in a wall; I prefer stone.

Upstairs, we found two more smaller bedrooms, one with a very nice view.

There was also a yard. Of course; we don't look at gardenless houses. It was very tidy, like the rest of everything else, a little small, but with a magnificent old church rising right up next to it.

It was facing the wrong way, though, and even now, just after noon, the shadow of the house was already starting to creep across the grass.

And so we thanked the nice British people who had shown us their home, and left.

Then a strange thing happenned. John, whose attitude was gently increasing toward the higher-pressure bracket with a tinge of desperation, asked us if we were hungry. "Sure," we told him. He directed us around the corner, literally, to the local cafe. "They do a good lunch," he told us. So we went in... but he insisted on waiting in our car. He didn't want to come in with us. And so, as we sat in the restaurant, we could see him eating his bag lunch just outside the window, sitting on Hydrangea's passenger seat hunched over his sandwich.

It was more bizarre than anything; Sarah said the strangeness was a typically Welsh sort of strangeness. Shed know better than I. But we didn't feel right sitting there and ordering a full lunch while John hung out in the car, so we just had beers and apple juice, before rejoining him, and then heading out to see our last house of the day.