Style And Substance

Elizabeth and her husband David spent three years transforming a ruin in Provence into a treasured family holiday home, and the end result is every inch the quintessential French property dream, as Vicky Leigh discovers.

- Vicky Leigh

With renovation projects on both sides of the Channel under their belts, Elizabeth and David are clearly not afraid of a challenge. The couple have recently finished renovating a property in Devon, where they live in the UK, and have also tackled two in France, both of which required considerably more than a bit of DIY and a lick of paint. Their first French property was a derelict house in a small village in Lot, which they bought in 1992 after enjoying several summers there with family and falling in love with the area.

“We spent a couple of summers in a row in Lot with my brother-in-law’s family and decided to look into buying our own property as we didn’t want to impose on them all the time,” says Elizabeth. “We loved the area and the idea of having our own house there, so my brother-in-law suggested we go and see the notaire in the village. As it turned out, he was handling the sale of several properties that were owned by a lady who had died without leaving a will. He took a big key out of a cupboard in his office and offered to take us to see them straight away. We were pretty much able to take our pick – we could virtually have bought the whole village for about £20,000!”

Having settled on the one they wanted to buy, Elizabeth and David went on to transform the house into a comfortable holiday home and enjoyed making use of it for the next 15 years. At that point they decided the village was perhaps a bit too quiet, and having done all they wanted to do to the property, they made the decision to sell it. “We were lucky as someone wanted to buy it, so we sold it in 2007,” says Elizabeth. “We thought that was the end of it and that we’d move on, but we realised we missed having a house in France so we started looking for another one to buy.”