The first night at the House With No Name

I panicked for a moment when I woke up. The room was bare, with ancient wooden beams, white-washed walls and a low, terracotta-tiled ceiling. Instead of the familiar hum of Oxford traffic, it was deathly quiet outside. Where the hell was I?

Then the amazing truth dawned. Nearly six years after we first set eyes on the House With No Name, we'd just spent our first night there. After a ten-hour drive from Calais, we'd arrived the night before to find the tumbledown farmhouse we bought on a whim all that time ago utterly transformed. It now has a kitchen, bathroom with views over the rolling French countryside and a beautifully restored stone staircase. Er, and apart from two beds and some gorgeous Cologne and Cotton linen, no furniture.

But with the middle part of the house habitable, a removal van from the UK will shortly trundle up the overgrown track to deposit a table, chairs, two sofas and a stack of books. What Jamie Briggs and his no-nonsense removal team will make of the House With No Name is anyone's guess. That's if they can even find the place. We couldn't give them a proper address because there isn't one.

But for a few days we've simply enjoyed the space, the peace and the quiet. We've each got a mug, a plate and, very importantly in this part of the world, a corkscrew. The fields are full of sunflowers, the sun's come out after a few stormy days and we're playing Amy Winehouse's stunning Back to Black album on my son's speakers. Like so many people, I'd never realised quite how brilliant she was before.

A weekend in Paris

“You shouldn’t have to buy an umbrella on vacation,” grumbled the American woman in the hotel lift. My daughter stifled a giggle. “Oh dear,” she whispered in my ear. “We’ve already bought three.”

We were in wet, grey Paris for a whistlestop weekend but the fact that the clouds had turned black the minute we stepped off the Eurostar didn’t matter a jot. We bought our first umbrella for eight euros at a tacky-looking tourist shop off the Champs Elysées. Big mistake. The shopkeeper warned us it wasn’t “très solide” and sure enough, the blooming thing snapped within half an hour. So we dashed into H&M and snapped up two garish brollies for just under ten euros. A much better move.

The great thing about being in Paris with my daughter was that we were keen to do pretty much the same things. We walked everywhere, lunched at the Rose Bakery, discovered that the ultra-chic Colette on the Rue Saint-Honoré now sells Topshop make-up and wandered round the Musée Rodin garden in the rain.

We stayed at La Maison Champs Elysées, a lovely hotel that’s been done up to the nines by Maison Martin Margiela, the avant-garde Belgian design house. We didn’t get an MMM room but the hotel is amazing, with a silver corridor, trompe l’oeil wallpaper and a pretty white drawing room where a waiter was playing jazz at the piano as we arrived. More to the point, it’s relatively affordable compared to other Paris hotels.

Our best discovery of the weekend though was a tiny shop called Popelini in the Marais (see above). Launched by Lauren Koumetz, who grew up in the Marais, and with a chef who used to work at Ladurée, it sells exquisite iced choux buns. Flavours range from cherry and pistachio to vanilla and strawberry and they’re so light and tiny you don’t feel guilty afterwards. You can buy just one or get a selection wrapped up in an elegant cerise box. Forget cupcakes and macaroons. Popelini makes them look completely old hat.

Mark my words, these choux buns will catch on in the UK faster than you can say Popelini.

Popelini
29 rue Debelleyme
75003 Paris

Will I get talked into buying a 2CV?

As building work continues apace on the House with No Name, the question of how we’re going to get around the rural back roads of southern France without a car is rearing its inquisitive head. We can bike to the nearest village for croissants and milk but for trips further afield we’ll need four wheels rather than two.

If I am going to buy a car in France then the only one that will do is a Citroën 2CV. They’re cheap, chic and well, not 100 per cent reliable, but I don’t care.

When I was little my mother had a bright green 2CV, which we drove through the Dorset lanes with the wind in our hair and Dory Previn singing Lemon Haired Ladies on the ropey old tape machine. My dad loathed the car because it was noisy and shockingly slow and my mum went off it after the canvas roof came adrift and knocked her half-unconscious as she drove along.

But my sister and I adored it and once my mother got a swankier car she gave it to us. I’d just started training as a reporter on the Mid-Devon Advertiser and when I set off for work at the crack of dawn every Monday morning me and my mum had to push it down the road for a quarter of a mile to get it started. My friends likened the car to “a deckchair on wheels,” but within a few weeks my fellow trainee and spin-doctor-to-be Alastair Campbell bought a Citroën Dyane (the slightly more sophisticated version of the 2CV) in exactly the same colour.

On a good day my top speed was 60mph but on bad days lorries and caravans whizzed past me with ease. I was still so entranced that when it finally gave up the ghost I bought an identical Deux Chevaux in a shade of pale blue Cath Kidston would give her eye-teeth for.

Twenty-five years on I’m still hankering after another 2CV – and my teenagers are egging me on in my quest. Even though 2CVs went out of production in 1990, you can still pick them up for a song in France. Last summer my daughter spotted a beaten-up turquoise 2CV for sale for three hundred euros outside a garage in Dieulefit and campaigned for days to make me buy it. I admit I was half-tempted but luckily someone else snapped it up before I could do something even sillier than usual.

But hmmm, this year I just might...

How it all began

I'm so excited. Five years after I bought the House with No Name, the first phase of the renovation is almost complete and we'll be staying there this summer. Our architect and builder friends have worked miracles, keeping its character while transforming it into a place of charm. Lots of readers have asked how I came to buy it in the first place so I've gone back to my old diaries and reprint the story here.

With the pound sinking like a stone and endless press reports about the British selling up in France and hurrying back across the Channel, what possessed me to buy a derelict farmhouse near Avignon? It’s got a dodgy roof, a major damp problem and a garden littered with old scrap – and two years after I signed on the dotted line the place is still completely uninhabitable.

I first began thinking about buying a small house in France when I met friends who’d sold up in rain-soaked Cumbria and moved lock, stock and barrel to a rambling house halfway up a stunning hillside in the Drôme, a little-known region sandwiched between the Rhône Valley and the foothills of the Alps.

Next I became transfixed by Matthew Parris’s A Castle in Spain, the story of his spur of the moment decision to buy a ruined castle in the wilds of Catalonia. Parris called it “one of those foolish challenges that grip us in middle life.” How true.

Then I was enthralled by C’est La Folie, Michael Wright’s uplifting Daily Telegraph column of how he bade farewell to his safe south London existence and moved to a farm in the Dordogne with only a cat, a piano and a vintage aeroplane for company.

Within months – and without giving the matter nearly enough thought – I’d thrown caution to the wind and done exactly the same thing. Well, without the aeroplane or the cat.

I’d vaguely asked a friend who’s lived in the Drôme for 35 years to look out for a holiday bolthole and out of the blue she sent me an email about a farmhouse for sale. “Beautiful place,” she said. “Great potential. South-facing, with its back up against a wooded hillside with ancient oaks. Very old farm with heaps of charm. It has a very good feel to it.”

Much to my horror, and before I’d even set eyes on the place, my husband rashly put an offer in on my behalf. The offer was far lower than the asking price so I naively assumed it would be rejected out of hand by the 80-year-old owner and her four grown-up children. Only it wasn’t.

By the time I pitched up two weeks later to see it, accompanied by my two teenage children, the estate agent and the notaire, the vendors were excitedly making plans to move into a new house with all mod cons in a nearby town.

I took one look at the house and wanted to scarper. I’d envisaged buying a low-maintenance, two-up two-down with a sunny terrace and here I was, halfway to buying a tumbledown six-bedroom wreck with half a roof, water seeping through the walls and a bathroom inhabited by a plague of rats. The garden was a three-acre jungle and the whole place needed, as the estate agent so delicately put it, “bringing back to life.” The notaire, immaculate in a pinstripe suit and snazzy black polo neck, was visibly shocked. He wrinkled his nose at the damp and scuttled back to his car at the first opportunity.

But despite all this, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to wreck the owners’ plans by saying “sorry, it’s all a horrendous mistake. I’m not touching this dump with a bargepole.”

The following day I pitched up to the lawyer’s office in the sleepy nearby village of Puy St Martin and signed the compromis de vente.

How I came to buy the house with no name

Sitting in Oxford, with the number 7 bus trundling past and Marks & Spencer just up the road, I sometimes think the house with no name must be a figment of my imagination. Am I going to wake up one day and discover that the tumbledown French farmhouse that inspired this blog was just a dream?

Definitely not. It all looked splendidly real when we sat in the courtyard in the scorching sun last week, drinking Clairette de Die, the local sparkling white wine, and admiring how far the renovation process has come.

When I first clapped eyes on it, the place was a wreck. But two things convinced me to throw caution to the wind and buy it. One was the terrace, where generations of farmers had sat under the old plane tree and put the world to rights over a glass or two of pastis. The other was a pretty sunlit field, bordered at one end by a coppice of distinguished-looking oak trees. I could just imagine long summer lunches there, with my daughter reading and my son whizzing about on his mountain bike.

Now the builders have worked wonders, ripping out the hardwood partitions that divided many of the rooms and replacing the dodgy floors and ceilings. I only wish I’d been there when one of them stopped everyone in their tracks by walking jauntily across the joists like the tightrope walker he used to be.

The adjoining barn has been utterly transformed too. Once full of discarded car doors, rusty bits of tractor and several lifetimes of junk, it now boasts two floors and a state-of-the art new roof which cost nearly as much as the house itself. The vast first floor is so breathtaking that we’re all arguing about what it should be used for. It’s the size of a tennis court and I’m secretly harbouring plans to make it my office.

Both my children have been involved in the project right from the start, from the day I signed the compromis de vente at the lawyer’s office to rolling up their sleeves and helping with heavy-duty building work. Two years ago, in blistering heat, my daughter painted the huge gates that open into the courtyard a tasteful shade of pale grey. She liked the colour so much she persuaded the builders to paint the beams inside the house the same hue. Meanwhile my son’s triumphs include demolishing an entire first-floor ceiling. It wasn’t the ideal convalescence for someone who’d recently broken his collar bone in three places, but he was adamant he wanted to do his bit.

PS: Several readers have asked whereabouts in France the house with no name actually is. It’s a tricky one because when I say it’s in the Drôme most people look blank. Even Anne-Marie, our sophisticated Parisian friend, didn’t know it. So, just to clarify. The Drôme is north of Provence, west of the Alps and east of the busy route de soleil that runs from Paris to the Côte d’Azur. The countryside is lush and green, with small farms, olive groves and majestic crags that tower over the landscape. A bit like Provence crossed with the Lake District in fact.

Dreaming of a second-hand 2CV

Slowly, slowly, the French farmhouse I bought on a mad whim back in 2006 is coming back to life. My husband and children always promised it would but, being a wimp, I had my doubts. We still haven’t managed to sleep a night there yet, but the tumbledown six-bedroom wreck with half a roof, terrible damp problem and bathroom inhabited by a plague of rats is looking – and I never thought I’d say this – well, rather beautiful.

The rats are long gone and the clever architect friends who are renovating the house have replaced the hotch-potch of windows with elegant pale grey ones. They’ve designed a new roof, built steps from the terrace to the front door, restored the stone staircase from the ground to the first floor and transformed the dingy downstairs kitchen and salon into stunning, light-filled rooms with domed ceilings.

Instead of wanting to run a mile from the place, I now want to spend as much time there as possible. My student daughter, keen to perfect her French, is even making plans to buy a second-hand 2CV and decamp there for the whole summer.

Progress is coming along at such a pace that when we visited the house last week, we decided to brave the new Avignon branch of IKEA to buy a kitchen and bathroom. I can report, by the way, that shopping in a French IKEA is just as horrendous as visiting a UK one. The upside is that we’ve added an impressive number of new words, from poignets and robinets to lave-vaisselle, to our French vocabulary. The downside is that we've got to go back again in the summer to buy a fridge.

White hyacinths and pink tulips

Walking past the florist’s shop at this time of year makes me sad. They’re getting ready for Mother’s Day and the pavement outside is filled with baskets of fragrant white hyacinths and delicate pink tulips that are still in bud.

Mother’s Day is bitter-sweet these days. I long to send my mum flowers wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon, fix lunch and catch up with all the gossip over a glass of champagne. But she died nearly seven years ago and instead of dwelling on what might have been I’m going to make the most of being with Lottie and Ned, my lovely teenage children.

The trouble is that even though she’s not here I still want to tell my mum everything. She’d be enthralled to hear I’ve recklessly bought a tumbledown farmhouse in the south of France. And she’d be appalled that it’s damp, derelict and only has half a roof. She’d be staggered by how tall Ned’s grown and how scary he is when he’s whizzing down hills at full pelt on his bike. She’d be so proud of Lottie’s place at university and fierce independence.

My grandmother died at the age of 62 and after that my mum always dreaded Mother’s Day. One year she wrote in her newspaper column: “Don’t say it’s sentimental rubbish, emotional blackmail, commercial exploitation and that your mother knows you love her anyway. I’m sure she does, but the joy she’ll get from a tangible expression of your feelings is more than worth the effort. There were times when I forgot to mark the day for my brilliant mother and what I’d give now to be able to send her flowers by the lorry load.”

As always she was completely right. So today I'm thinking about her and remembering all the wonderful times we had...