On 6.v.26 I moved into my new home.
OK, I am extremely grateful that that is not how it looks now. That is how it looked in about 2001 when Deirdre and her then partner bought. This is an image from roughly the same position at some more recent date.
This is pretty much the same view, from the garden, some time last year.
This next block takes you to the video that Deirdre made using her ‘photos of the conversion of the property from a derelict state in 2001. Assuming you get into it, you can use the controls at the bottom to make start and stop the video and to make it full screen.
Here are a few more views of house and/or garden from the estate agent’s pages. I will get round to replacing them with my own images.
Really rather bizarrely large area of cleanly finished stonework around that doorway but the much less in the rest of the house. I hope to find out more about the history of the house over the next few years. When Deirdre and Liesl bought it it was empty and the local notaire who officiated at the extremely long official purchase meeting on 6.vi.26 was born across the road in the tiny hamlet here and played in the basement of this house as a child when it was really pretty derelict. I have now met Pascale, who apparently lived in it and I think owned it before it became derelict and look forward to getting her history of it. Rumour has it that it was the local doctor’s house early in the 20th C and that the stone cross just behind the property is a memorial to his daughters who died in the Spanish ‘flu pandemic of 1918-20 (estimated deaths 17 to 100 million).
You can see the inflatable/portable jacuzzi on the right against the perimeter wall there. It spends the winter in the garage but the in the summer it’s there and it’s plumbed in and has its (safe) electricity supply! That one has gone but we do mean to replace it!
You can see the gate onto the road there too and there’s room for at least one car (boo!) down the end there (and I’ve added two composters!). I will probably use the garage partly as a gym but it’s vast so at least one car should fit in the garage. The garage entrance is round the back (or front depending on how you think of it!) of the house behind us here.
Going inside I really do have a very limited set of images from the agents. (So get on with replacing those with your own Christopher!) The house is almost two separate houses as you can sort of see from the above images. The half on the left is the “visitors'” half and is very modernised with three double bedrooms all on the first floor, two with ensuite bath or shower room. There’s a lobby below and a lovely little mezzanine before you get to the bedrooms. This is one of them.
This is the same room courtesy of an image J took when we visited.
And this is the other bedroom there with ensuite (courtesy of J again).
And this is one of those ensuite bathrooms.
And this is the sort of mezzanine area before the three bedrooms. That’s my arm intruding on J’s shot and my reflection in the window. Bedrooms are off a little hallway through that door to the right there!
So loads of room and a fair bit of privacy for visitors.
The other half of the house has a huge garage (no images yet) which opens out onto the street and a cellar that is just ventilation really: you can’t really stand up straight in it. Deidre was advised to leave it like that as it functions as air conditioning in the summer. I don’t see any reason to disagree!
The garage opens into a huge kitchen …
And as you can see, that opens directly into the lovely big living room with its huge open fire.
That has a door, just about visible on the right, that connects through to the visitors’ half of the house, door opening into the garden ahead (and quaint porthole window) and door on the far left in that view into the cellar. The steps you can see going up next to that, beyond the fireplace, go into the smaller living room. Here’s the smaller living room.
Another short set of steps get you into the cinema room which used to look like this but doesn’t now as it’s become my work room. Hm, I have no images of it as it is now. Late in the evening now so I will fix that tomorrow.
And finally, my super swish bedroom and its bathroom.
It’s all so much more, and so much more swish, than I had imagined. The Tardoire river is down the hill from there and the hamlet of Rairie is part of the commune of Écuras. Communes have their own, unpaid, mayors but Écuras is particularly communal as it has its own little shop run as a collective (I’m now the 98th member of the collective. Écuras also has a little open air theatre, event hall, communal orchard and clearly a very genuine community. They have appointed someone to reopen the little restaurant so I will be able to walk to that soon. There are some Brits but most of the local population is French and most of whom have been there generations.
I am getting to my neighbours, both French and non-French (a lot of Dutch up the road in Le Chat (yes, that’s the name of a sort of holiday hut village that is almost all Dutch).
The nearest town is Montbron with a canoe/kayak club, prize winning boulangerie/patisserie, two good sized supermarkets (Intermarché and Aldi) and two weekly markets (on different days and in different squares!) and a monthly market as well. It has several restaurants, one very friendly little one and a friendly bar. It also has an absolutely typical French café/tabac run by the famously grumpy sister of the famously friendly woman who runs the friendly restaurant! (I am not making this up I promise.) Just outside town there is an affordable (honest) Michelin starred restaurant. All very cyclable.
There’s a daily bus, once each way, between Montbron and Angoulême which is a beautiful town with a largely untouched medieval heart. That’s the nearest train station: two to 2.5 hours to/from Paris Montparnasse: €50 to €80 one way so the journey to 23 Rairie is very doable by train from London in one day (with planning). Angoulême also has a tiny, not very realistic airport (I think weekly flights to and from Glasgow!) Limoges (lovely) with a meaningful airport and train station, is a taxi journey away East.
The countryside is mixed farming with spinneys and small woods as well as fields and some vineyards not far away. I think it will provide lovely mixed bird habitats. My bird count is climbing fast.
Off the one main road to Limoges all the other local roads are small and quiet. The countryside is a bit reminiscent of Warwickshire where I lived from six to 18 with a not dissimilar mix of farms and woodland. However, the farms here are small and the arable includes sunflowers and maize not corn, oats and barley. It is a bit more hilly than Warwickshire and warmer of course and can get hot in summer but not intolerably. The coast is a couple of hours by car (boo!). Going Northerly gets you to La Rochelle and the fun Île d’Oleron and Île de Ré. Going pretty much due West gets you to Royan where a ferry gets you across to the sand dunes and West coast all the way down to Spain or you hit the Charente estuary which goes inland to Bordeaux to the South (I think that’s the first point at which a bridge crosses the Charente). All lovely.
13.iv.26
‘Photo of the wisteria in blossom from Deirdre!
Created 4.iv.26, last updated 12.vi.26. Much more to come!