How I bagged my dream holiday home for less than £10k ...and YOU can too!
JUL IA Bradbury’ s holiday home is an idyllic blue cottage in a tiny Portuguese village where she can throw open her shuttered windows to reveal a sunny vista of cobbled lanes, fig trees and olive groves reaching up distant hillsides.
Nearby there’s an old-fashioned lido where her children can swim and a pretty medieval town for shopping and restaurants, while the historic city of Porto and the Atlantic’s world- class surfing beaches are an easy day trip away.
It’s the kind of place a TV star can truly kick back and relax in (without even a phone or wi-fi), but the house has a secret that will surprise anyone envious of her glamorous lifestyle: it cost under £10,000 to buy and do up, just twice the cost of the average British family holiday.
‘ I had started to hear stories of people who’d bought second homes abroad for tiny sums but I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a catch,’ says the presenter.
Curious, she began to research the possibility of buying a summer retreat for herself, her partner and their three children – son Zeph, who will be seven this week, and threeyear-old twin daughters Xanthe and Zena. The result is a new series for ITV, charting Julia’s own purchase and renovation of her tumbledown cottage and investigating the burgeoning trend for Britons buying abroad on a budget.
The six-parter, which begins on Tuesday, discovers holiday hideaways in a treehouse, shepherd’s huts, a river boat, troglodyte caves, and other homes in more traditional bricks and mortar. The countries they were found in include Bulgaria, Spain, France, Hungary and the region that captured Julia’s heart – northern Portugal. She found herself there in May last year after giving up on her dream of buying in the Algarve, where property was well beyond her budget.
The Little Blue House, as it’s known, became hers in June 2017. A dozen visits, some which saw Julia flying out from the UK, others involving a detour while on the road filming elsewhere in Portugal, helped ensure its renovation was finished by last September.
‘I saved money by haggling over the asking price and then cheekily requesting all the rustic furniture be included in the deal too. The final purchase price was £5,700. I spent about £900 on legal fees, and the remainder went on tradesmen and building materials. I allowed myself a contingency fund, and when I discovered the nastiest of plumbing problems – a cesspit under the bathroom – I was very glad of it.’
As well as extensive plumbing, Julia had to have the house connected to mains electricity and rewired, the kitchen and bathroom refurbished and the whole place made snug and secure. In the show she is seen calling on her friend, TV salvage expert Max McMurdo, for ideas and practical help.
‘I’m pretty handy with a sledgehammer, am happy to try tiling and anyone can paint a wall, but Max was the one who said, “Bradbury, I’ve found a way to turn your entire staircase around,” ’ she laughs.
Another friend who speaks Portuguese also proved invaluable, liaising with builders and keeping neighbours informed of developments. ‘I can speak enough Portuguese to order a custard tart and a cup of coffee,’ says Julia. ‘As with any project anywhere, I had issues with builders, including one who tried to get us to install a lighting system that would have lit up a mansion, never mind my one-up, onedown cottage. We agreed a deal with him and then he disappeared anyway. That’s not the kind of problem you can solve with sign language.’
Max’s innovative approach and zeal for recycling helped turn Julia’s cottage i nto a budgetfriendly bolthole. ‘For example, he helped me create a pulley-system partition with bunk beds attached which slides across the master bedroom, dividing one big room into two smaller spaces. The idea works well and it gives us – a family of five – the space we need,’ she says.
Julia hopes to spend at least a couple of weeks a year in Portugal as she takes a break from her hectic filming schedule. Friends and family have an open invitation too.
‘I feel very at home in the village already,’ she says. ‘During the renovations, neighbours cooked for us, they let us use their electricity, and one lady even invited me to have a shower at her house. It’s such a different way of life to where we live in West London, or even where I grew up in Rutland. It’s slow and peaceful and we all benefit.’
Some of Julia’s earliest memories are holidays at her Greek grandmother’s home in a seaside village outside Athens. She would feast on traditional kebabs and fruit from the trees lining the streets. Most of all, she had a freedom to roam that she wasn’t allowed at home.
‘That is something I wanted to recreate for my own children and I know I’ve found it in Portugal,’ she says. ‘It’s worth a lot more than £10,000 to me: in fact, it’s priceless.’ £10k Holiday Home is on ITV at 7.30pm on Tuesday.
CHEEKILY, I ASKED FOR THEIR FURNITURE TO BE INCLUDED