Minervois Matchmaker

A dream property in Aude and an article in French Property News inspired French Property and partner Adrie to tie the knot

Shortly after the 2016 Brexit referendum, we decided to start looking for a place to buy in the EU.

For 20 years I owned a Dordogne farmhouse that had been converted into two gîtes, but had sold that years earlier due to lack of time. The experience of dealing with paying guests had left me somewhat reluctant to go through the whole thing again. Dutch guests kept taking home our electric kettles – produced by Philips in Holland – for example. But this time we urgently needed to secure our freedom to move around Europe, something we have both enjoyed for as long as we can remember. Establishing a new base became our immediate priority.

A LOFT IN LONDON

I’m a retired City worker. Adrie is Dutch, but we met through a mutual friend when I worked at the European Options Exchange (EOE) in Amsterdam for a couple of years. We moved to London together in 1995, and bought a loft apartment for £73,000 on the South Bank before Tate Modern was announced. In 1999, Adrie bought a picturesque thatched cottage next to a medieval castle in Somerset as a home for the weekends.

Over the years, our situation changed. Following the opening of Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre, the Millennium Bridge and various other developments on the South Bank, the London apartment is now valued at £1.3m. As Adrie works mainly in London during the week as a copywriter for government and financial websites, we have no intention of selling the apartment. I think you should never sell property in central London. But after considering all the options, we did take some equity out of the property to buy a place in France.

For years we thought about moving somewhere with a better climate and better food. Brexit gave us the push to start looking actively. I must admit that the drive for that largely came from me. But with hindsight, we should have done it years ago.