Buying a Property in France

This is the answer to the question "Why did you choose your area or village in France." A friend of mine is interviewing me for a book and this was the answer I gave her. I thought I would post it here because EVERYONE, American and French, ask me this question when they first meet me. I'm thinking of printing this answer off and just handing it out whenever I meet someone new.

The idea had been percolating in my mind that I wanted to purchase a farm in France. But I hadn’t verbalized the idea to my husband because I was CERTAIN that he would say NON.

When he told me in 2000 that he was going to go with me on my French vacation, I started looking at properties on the internet. I contacted two realtors, both were in Normandy, and after an initial reply, they never got back to me again. So I gave up on realtors.

Why Normandy? I was looking for one of those old farms where all the buildings formed a square or rectangular formation with the house . . . sort of a mini fortress. Most of these seemed to be in Normandy. I didn’t care about the weather or the scenery; I was just interested in finding a working farm. I knew that I didn’t want to be in Provence . . . too developed, too overrun with tourists in the summer, and I wanted a farm with cows and sheep and Provence farms seemed to be all crops. Also, I’m very pale and don’t tan well so I didn’t want to be exposed to the sun constantly down there. I didn’t want to be in the northeast or near Belgium, because we’re Jewish and I psychologically, didn’t want to be near Germany . . . I also knew that my husband would never agree to buy a place in the zone where the Germans had invaded twice in the past century. (I am three-quarters German Catholic by birth.)

The southwestern part of France where we ended up did not interest me because 1. I had never been to see it, and 2. I wanted to be closer to Paris than to Barcelona.

After the failure to get anywhere with the two Normandy realtors, I kept searching the web . . . staying away from realtors, because I now considered all French realtors flaky, but I kept searching for information on relocating to France. I found a site, www.investinfrance.com This is a chamber-of-commerce type organization which is funded by the French government for the purpose of attracting businesses to areas of France that have high unemployment.

We have a tiny children’s video business, that makes full-length videos out of stage plays, and so I e-mailed Invest in France a one-page proposal to open up an office in France and hire five employees, mirroring my office in San Francisco. We had filmed in Europe previously and relocating to France actually seemed to make sense at the time.

They had a representative contact me from the Los Angeles office. The office had received seventeen positive replies to my proposal from different towns and areas in France. I took all the proposals that were on the western side of the country and told the LA office that we would give them a week to tour us around. Then I told my husband that this is how we were going to spend one of our three weeks in France. I have no idea what he thought. I remember that, to my great surprise, he didn’t protest. Invest in France does offer incentives for businesses to set up shop in France, and I made this pitch to him and he was intrigued.

The week spent with Invest in France was a WONDERFUL way to see the country. We had to pay for our hotel and travel, but they made all the arrangements and they bought all our meals, morning, noon, and evening. So we saw the best that the areas had to offer. We toured and were wined and dined from 8am in the morning until midnight each day . . . it was hard work! We met mayors, actors, local businessmen. We toured Bordeaux, we toured small villages. We viewed beautiful properties that the mayors were willing to finance for us. They staged elaborate dinners and lunches in chateaux for us. Each region tried to outdo the last region. Ironically, we chose to purchase our farm in the region that didn’t go to any great length to impress us!

We ended up buying a farm in the Midi-Pyrennes, in the departement du Lot. I think they didn’t try to impress us because they have Airbus and all their supporting industries so we were very insignificant to their office. However, the man in charge of the Cahors’ development office was very smart and had all sorts of great ideas about how to market out tapes in France and Europe and we liked that. We also liked the weather which was warmer down here than in Normandy, Brittany, and around Bordeaux. I thought Brittany was more beautiful, and the property we found up there was my DREAM French property, but the weather was too much like San Francisco and at the time we were looking we thought we would still be spending half our time in San Francisco . . . so we wanted something different when it came to weather.

So in July 2000, we decided that we would purchase a property in the Lot. Having decided that, in order to insure that I established a beachhead in France, I decided that since my son was about to enter high school, I would start him in France. We enrolled him in a private, English language school in Toulouse. He boarded with a French family that school year.

Surprisingly, my husband never got cold feet. At Christmastime, he flew out with my brother (a rancher from Montana) to look at properties in the Lot. So they were viewing property at its most unsightly time of the year . . . no vegetation, and the weather was very cold that year. I had been out in October/November for two weeks and so I gave them some realtors and some properties that I wanted them to look at. All of my choices were much more romantic looking than what was finally chosen . . . and all of my choices were in the opposite side of the departement than the one where we bought.

We ended up buying in the wine country . . . I was interested in the sheep country!

At the time, he was looking for property, we were in the process of purchasing my father’s solid-state control manufacturing business. The loan had been approved and we thought that we would close that deal in January. My father ended up backing out of the deal; but not before we purchased our property. Thinking that we would eventually start manufacturing in France, because the biggest customer of that business had just expanded to Europe, we were looking for a property that would allow us to have a small manufacturing plant. I wanted some out-buildings that we could convert into manufacturing facilities . . . I didn’t want to clutter the French countryside with more modern steel buildings.

So our criteria was:
A working farm
A stream or river running through the property
Large outbuildings
A woods
Isolated so that we wouldn’t hear traffic

I wanted to be much more isolated than we are on the property my husband chose. We’re only 5 kilometers from a town with all amenities, and that’s a bit too close for me. However, when my husband called from France to discuss the property he had found, the one we bought, he made the pitch that he thought I wouldn’t want to cook every day, and that I needed to be near restaurants even though I said that wasn’t true. He also liked the fact that the town had a movie theatre.

My husband has never lived in the country so I think he was projecting his desire not to be isolated on to me. Because I really do wish that we were farther away from civilization than we ended up being. I am off the road, but I can still hear it when a car goes by on the road . . . and that’s the main thing I dislike about our property!

He seemed to be enamored with the property, and so I said to go ahead and buy it without me seeing it. He was intrigued by all the mechanical aspects of the water mill. (Ironic since we haven’t had water in the canal since after the first summer here.) He did send me photos via the internet. I thought that if I had him wait until I could get out there to view properties that 1. his enthusiasm would cool off, 2. we might never agree on what property to buy.

The property has a working mill (the water was flowing then) which can generate electricity so that was an added attraction to my husband regarding the potential manufacturing facility. In addition, the mill had been operating until very recently and was the site of heavy truck traffic so the neighbors were used to the noise and nuisance of light industry on the property.

So he put down the earnest money, and we closed six months later in June.

In April, I came out to visit my son during his spring break. I drove up to view the property and I hated it. I didn’t call my husband for three days because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to say anything nice to him. He said he was willing to lose the earnest money (which was substantial) and we could look for something else. But I found it difficult to believe that he was willing to throw away that much money and I wasn’t foolish enough to throw away that much money, so I reluctantly said we should go ahead with the deal.

I spent two months here at the farm that first summer. When I returned to the U.S., my husband had stayed behind to finish up the walnut harvest and I received a letter from a cookie factory that wanted to buy the place. I threw the letter away because I didn’t want to sell my “ugly” little farm. I had fallen in love with the neighbors, and the village, and the area.

The French have a word, terroir. And its meaning, as described to me by a local vintner, means that a good wine is an expression of the land in which its grape vines grow. I feel that I have found my personal terroir. I thrive here on this little farm . . . creatively, personally, spiritually. This farm wasn’t the perfect image of my French fantasy, but it was the place I’ve been searching for all of my life . . . since I moved from my childhood farm in Ohio. This little patch of land is where I have found contentment and bliss and I am certain that it was my destiny to end up here.