Fashion Conscious

Vanessa Howard and William McDonald have created a vintage fashion museum at their home in Dordogne to give their gîte business a cutting edge, as Vicky Leigh learns

- Vicky Leigh

I think you have to have a point of difference otherwise everyone is doing the same thing. You need a USP,” says Vanessa Howard, and as USPs go, hers is certainly unique. She and her partner William McDonald have created a private vintage fashion museum at their home in Dordogne, where they also run gîte accommodation.

The benefits are twofold: the museum offers their guests an additional experience that they’re unlikely to find elsewhere and allows Vanessa to continue to indulge her passion for vintage fashion.

Vanessa first visited France at the age of 14 and always thought that she’d like to live there, but it would be 40 years before she was in a position to seriously think about making it happen.

“I was approaching 55 and had a long commute to work, and I decided I needed to get off the treadmill,” says Vanessa. “We felt we needed to do something different and as we don’t have children we decided we would move to France, so we visited the French Property Exhibition in London and subscribed to the magazines.”

CREATIVE THINKING

At that stage, Vanessa, ahead of marketing, and carpenter William didn’t know where in France they wanted to move to but knew it needed to be somewhere rural.

The couple would also need to generate an income of some description and thought a B&B could be the answer. When they learned of one for sale in Dordogne they arranged a viewing and combined it with seeing a number of other properties in the area to help them get an idea of what they were really looking for.