FOR ALMOST HALF THE PRICE!
Couple who sold their semi in traffic-choked Kent and escaped to a Grand Designs nine-bed French chateau...
S‘In Kent, I had to queue to get out of my own driveway’
ITTING in the vast, high-ceilinged kitchen of their very own chateau, sunlight pouring through windows that look out over a vista of rural bliss, Heidi and Anthony Muir are a vision of contentment.
There hasn’t been sight or sound of a car on the tiny single-track lane outside their front door all day, and save for the two donkeys in the field opposite and their French neighbour Bernard tending to his vegetable garden, all is utterly, blissfully tranquille.
‘Listen,’ urges Heidi with a grin. ‘There’s just nothing.’
And there isn’t, not a whisper, save for the wind and the occasional chirrup of bird song.
If Heidi and Anthony look like the very definition of cats who got the cream, it’s frankly not surprising. This time last year the couple were fighting through traffic every day on their respective commutes from their four-bedroom semi on the outskirts of Maidstone, Kent.
After several decades of seemingly relentless development, by the time the couple loaded all their earthly possessions on to a removal van late last summer, their once peaceful home on the fringes of town was beginning to feel like the heart of a heaving metropolis.
‘There were houses being built all the time, not just a few, but thousands,’ says Heidi.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when plans were passed for two separate developments of 6,000 and 4,000 homes, and the prospect of all the new owners’ cars on the roads.
‘We used to be able to pop to town in four minutes and back out again, but it got to the point where it could take 40 minutes just to go into Maidstone,’ says Anthony, 53. ‘One day, there was a traffic jam in front of our house — I had to queue to get off the driveway and it was only going to get worse.’
The solution? You’re looking at it. Last summer, the Muirs sold their suburban semi for £600,000 and snapped up Chez Jallot — a four-storey (five if you include the cellars), nine-bedroom chateau in the middle of one of the most peaceful corners of rural France — for £370,000, a sum only around £50,000 more than the average price of an English home.
For that, the couple didn’t just get a modern, well-insulated and double-glazed manor house, they also got two comfortable gîtes and an already flourishing bed and breakfast business.
It’s the kind of escape to the country wistful urbanites dream of — but rather than doing it here and saddling themselves with the inflated cost of extra space, Heidi and Anthony had other ideas.
‘You can find remote country houses in England, but we didn’t want a mortgage,’ says Heidi, a 55-year-old mother-of-three, who grins from ear to ear each time she looks around the sprawling stone-clad residence of which she is now the proud chatelaine.
Chez Jallot is certainly remote, standing in a tiny hamlet — also called Chez Jallot — which is currently home to eight residents (shortly to drop to five when an existing homeowner and her children make a temporary retreat to New Zealand).
The hamlet is nestled in La Creuse, which is part of the Limousin, in central France, the French equivalent of the Lake District. The small settlement of granite buildings look like they have been carved from the land that time forgot.
And Chez Jallot (the chateau) nearly was the house that time forgot, having served as a French Resistance headquarters during the World War II until it was set on fire by the occupying German troops in 1944.
It was then, as fans of Channel 4’s Grand Designs will know, restored in 2004 by another British couple, Doug Ibbs and Deni Daniel. Their efforts to turn what were essentially four granite walls with no roof into a habitable abode became one of the most popular shows in the programme’s history.
This history is all part of the allure for Heidi and Anthony. Like many of us, they occasionally harboured Grand Design dreams of their own as they raised their two sons and daughter in their Kent home, a house that was Heidi’s grandmother’s when it was built in the 1930s, then her mother’s and then theirs. (Heidi bought it in 1993 and they were mortgage free by the time they sold.)
‘We always watched the show,’ says Heidi. ‘ And this one [the episode featuring Chez Jallot] was so memorable, it was a massive inspiration. But we had three young children then and weren’t looking for a project.’
Circumstances changed when Heidi was made redundant from her job as services manager at a local boarding school. Anthony was happy working at a cycling centre, but increasingly frustrated by his commute, and the couple realised that with two of their children living and working in London and the third happily at university, a whole new chapter lay ahead.
It was not so much a mid-life crisis as a mid-life revelation that propelled a total upheaval.
The Muirs began scouring the internet looking not just for property, but for regions in which to buy. They hadn’t even visited La Creuse prior to getting in their car in January 2022, taking the ferry from Dover to Calais and driving the seven hours south. Rather, they alighted upon the region because of its appeal on paper, after a failed attempt to find something further north in Brittany or Normandy.
‘We’d been pursuing another house, but that fell through, so we thought we have to take this more seriously,’ says Anthony. ‘We put our house on the market and accepted an offer in a week, so we knew we were in a selling position, then said let’s go back to France and find this house.’
Back then, they agreed a budget of £80,000-£120,000, which would give them a similar-sized kitty for any necessary work. And so it was that one chilly morning in January they rolled up for their very first viewing — a ‘very sweet’, within
budget, village house … only to be put off by the words of a passing Frenchman, who declared it ‘ tres cher’ (very expensive).
The agent showing the property was undeterred, revealing she had another house she could show them that afternoon: Chez Jallot.
‘We knew it was up for sale, but we thought it was more than we wanted to pay,’ says Anthony. ‘And admittedly, back then, we didn’t know exactly where it was!’
Budgets, as they are prone to, flew out of the window the minute they saw Chez Jallot.
‘We went, “Oh, it’s that house”,’ laughs Heidi, who proceeded to walk around the property urging herself ‘don’t cry’.
‘We knew from the moment we walked in that it was a no-brainer. Look at what we were getting,’ she says, gesturing at the proportions of the place she now calls home.
Bowled over, they asked the owner (another Brit, who bought it from Doug and Deni) if they could stay, as paying guests, for two nights. By the time they left, they had signed the first document paving the way to becoming new custodians of Chez Jallot.
A leap of £250,000 in budget seems steep by any stretch, but Heidi says: ‘Not only were we buying the house, all the furniture came with it, too!’
Not that the Muirs haven’t made the place their own. They have redecorated (a single slither of yellow paint remains in the kitchen in homage to the original Grand Design) and Heidi has delighted in scouring brocantes ( antique shops) for additions of her own.
Their own furniture, which they transported at a cost of £11,000 by removal lorry from Kent, is largely sitting in the two adjoining gîtes and the vast attic at the top of Chez Jallot, where Heidi also has an office. Fees, removals and redecoration have cost them in the region of £20,000 so far, a modest sum all considered.
There are four ensuite bedrooms for guests, plus a master suite, and Heidi may create a fifth guest room — the maximum she is allowed as a chambre d’hôte.
There are then vast cellars below the house, and even a hidden tunnel which leads under the road to a lovingly-restored lavoir — an outdoor wash pool where the servants of the original Monsieur Jallot, a master builder, would wash his clothes.
This isn’t a holiday home for Heidi and Anthony, who share Chez Jallot with dogs Poppy and Coco (Poppy, an expat like them, and Coco a French-born pup). They haven’t kept so much as a tiny crash pad in the UK, although they are very happy that it’s just a 90-minute flight from Limoges back to London.
‘We didn’t come out here and buy this house to make money,’ says Heidi. ‘We have come out here for a completely different life.’
‘We have some equity from the house in Kent, we have our pensions and, as we see it, we are custodians of this house,’ adds Anthony. ‘We don’t expect it to soar in value; this is not like in England where our house was worth ten times more than we purchased it for. That’s not going to happen here, outside of Paris or St Tropez.
‘If we lose £50,000, but stay for ten years and are not sitting on the M20 for 45 minutes every day not going anywhere, that is fine.’
They arrived, believe it or not, with barely a scrap of French between them. Google Translate and the ‘SayHi’ language app have proved invaluable.
But these do have flaws. ‘When I was writing our brochure, I got a local lady to proofread it,’ says Heidi. ‘She was laughing her head off because, where I said to guests with pets, “could you tidy up after them”, what I had actually said was “pick your dog up and put your dog in the bin”.
Language lessons are part of their post-Brexit visa requirements, and Heidi is justifiably proud that she passed the required test after 100 hours of lessons. Anthony, however, is still ploughing his way through four sevenhour lessons a week at an immigration centre in a nearby town.
They also had to undergo medicals, submit chest X-rays and secure private medical insurance before being allowed to make Chez Jallot home. Next up for both are four seven-hour ‘civic’ lessons on French culture, something they are happy to embrace to secure their visas, which they have to renew annually.
They are regulars at their local cafe run by some Dutch residents and on provision-swapping terms with their nearest neighbours, Bernard and Josiette, who live just over the back garden wall. Bernard delivers vegetables from his allotment and Heidi reciprocates with cake — she’s not quite worked out what to offer in return for the wild boar he proffered last week.
Of course, there are pitfalls to starting a new life in an entirely different country. There’s the weather to get used to — not dissimilar to the UK, if you discount the tornado that hit last week and the thunderstorms that have already blown up two internet routers, and Heidi now has a lightning tracker app to alert her when a storm is coming so she can scurry around turning devices off.
She misses few things. Fish and chips and Cheddar cheese top the list: ‘I’m told you can just go to the cheese counter and ask for Cheddar, but I couldn’t,’ she insists. ‘The French have such a wonderful array of cheese.
‘Adjusting to shops being closed for two hours at lunchtime is hard, but I love that shops are closed on Sunday. You do have to be so much more prepared out here; the supermarket is a half-hour drive away. Though, ironically, it took the same time in England just because of traffic jams.’
Frankly, any drawbacks all seem a small price to pay for what they have gained. And adjustments have been made.
‘Now when I say: “Shall we have a takeaway tonight”, we both laugh. There are no takeaways or ready-meals for us now. A quick meal is “let’s just have some eggs”,’ chuckles Heidi.
‘From the moment we walked in, we knew it was a no-brainer’