There’s a magnet on our refrigerator that reads, “Leap and the Net Will Appear.” Though this would be poor advice for a free solo climber of El Capitan, it sums up our family approach to real estate. Alper-Leroux history is filled with residences bought by either Cecile or myself sight unseen, houses in total disrepair that required faith on a zealot’s level that we could ever make them habitable (including animals under the floor and in one case an apartment with no floor at all), so it is hardly surprising that the way we bought our house in France followed that same pattern.
We had been talking about getting a place in Europe for a long time. As dual citizens of both France and the US, we had more options. The Let’s Live in Europe discussion followed another pattern we have, a wild sine wave of family-confusing speculation that this time included buying: abandoned villages in Spain and France, huge old country mansions with barns, creating a writer’s compound with multiple huts where people could come to be inspired, and small apartments in Paris. I was super into the idea of outbuildings, where I could maybe learn to forge metal. Not sure why, probably some hyperactive allele left over from the blacksmith ancestors on my Mom’s side asserting itself.
The way this house became reality had a lot to do with the pandemic. Cecile wanted to spend her birthday in France, so she found an AirBandB in Provence, up a mountainside in a valley roughly inland of Toulon. It had 3 bedrooms, built onto an old chapel in a hamlet surrounded by country houses and presided over by a rough-shouldered limestone mountain called La Ste Baume. In the valley below, no less than five vineyards spread out across a valley with soil so fertile that one winery had been founded by Romans and was still in operation.
We originally booked for March (but then Covid), then May (still Covid), finally in October we arrived. And in the month we spent there, we realized maybe this was the place. We could hike from our house to a trailhead that connected us to a huge network of paths through the hills. Other hikes nearby followed tree-shadowed streams under high limestone cliffs. The Mediterranean, including Toulon, the peninsula of Hyeres, and the wild beauty of the Isles of Porquerolles just offshore, were only 45 minutes away. There are several villages in the valley, each with an open market on a different day of the week so we could always get fresh produce, olives, cheese and other bounteous products of our little valley. About an hour away, Aix-en-Provence is a small but lovely city offering a scaled-down selection of Parisian shops, open boulevards, fountains and as always in Provence, the mountains behind.
We didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, uncharacteristically, so when Cecile had to go back to Boston to record a seven-minute video (the CEO of her company felt it’d be better if she flew 8 hours to do something she could do from the upstairs bedroom, a sign of how most American executives handled the pandemic), I took those few days to drive 60 kilometers in every direction I could. Maybe there was a better place somewhere in the area we didn’t know about. But as I wandered the back roads, I didn’t find any. Some were closer to the sea- but not much. Some had mountains, but were not halfway up the slope. In fairness, they all had vineyards. There are more vineyards here than there are half-truths and outright lies in American corporate communications.
On our last day, we loaded up the car to drive to Paris, where we would return the car and fly back to the US. We decided to take a last walk, and in the process, Cecile met and struck up a conservation with (and thereby automatically charmed) the neighbors, Charles and Marie, a firecracker of a couple in their mid 70s who along with another couple, now in their 80s had transformed the ruined buildings of a small hamlet into a Provencal postcard of stone walls, vines climbing ancient buildings and flowering trees in courtyards. We ended up spending a couple hours with them, touring their multiple houses, even taking a golf cart ride to a place on sale nearby, and Cecile told them (of course all in French) we’d love to live in the area someday. They said they’d keep an eye out for us. We exchanged contact details, then waved and drove off.
About two months later, Cecile got an email from Charles. He knew a guy whose niece was getting divorced and she had a small house for sale about 800 meters down the slope from the hamlet. She reached out and started a conversation with Carole, and it looked promising. A small newer house (about 1000 square feet, on about a third of an acre, with a pool and outdoor kitchen featuring a wood-fired pizza oven. The landscaping was half-finished, the guy in the couple having been a landscaper who did much of the work himself on weekends, but it had huge potential, and bordered on a wild lot behind with pine and olive trees.
We told Carole, who was also the realtor, we’d purchase the place at asking price. That opened a magic portal into which we tumbled, the dark, convoluted mystery of the French real estate process. The first document was like part of an American offer, but indicated we planned to buy. We’d need to go to France to meet with a Notaire (more like a combination real estate lawyer and arbitrator) to make the official offer and deposit. Cecile booked us a whirlwind 5-day trip — we flew in, finally saw the place in person, on a cold, clear wind-swept day in March—and then I spent three hours in a office in a nearby town struggling to comprehend the legal conversation and documents I was about to sign.
From my point of view the translation would have looked like this:
Notiare VIDMAR . “Now we are looking at the (justicatif energie-something) which is required by the village government and the (no idea whatsoever what that means). This is good, because as you can see the energy rating is A, and the (what the heck is that word?) is very good.”
Me: “Of course, absolutely.”
Notiare VIDMAR: “You will also need to transfer the funds for the remainder of the purchase price 48 hours ahead of time, because the Monday before is (some incomprehensible holiday we don’t have in the US) so the bank will be closed.”
Me: “Of course, absolutely.”
Notiare Isabelle . “Sign here, please.”
Me: “Of course, absolutely.”
We signed the offer, and three months later returned to enjoy an equally incomprehensible ceremony, one that had been preceded by a stress-filled moment the day before under a tree in a vineyard on an island in the Mediterranean where my brother-in-law helped me transfer funds on a hot-spotted laptop and a phone using two different SIM cards- because the two-factor authentication was tied to a US phone number. All this to make the 48-hour-ahead-of-time deadline for a holiday whose origin I never did understand.
In the end, we got the keys, rolled up and opened the door, and there we were. In France.
In a house with no furniture but what we brought in suitcases. Or power, water, internet. We did have family guests arriving, both our children and my father-in-law with us, and a few other items we had transported, but we did have with many cases of rose, so that took the edge off.
The ways we dealt with that situation, and with setting up connections to all the things we needed to live there, is another story. How then, did Chris, Cecile and family do it, you might ask? Did they sleep on a hard tile floor in only the clothes on their backs, with no power or water? Did they drink all the rose or just some? And what happened to their poor children and Cecile’s dad?
Tune in for Part 2 of We Bought a House in France After All, coming soon to this space.
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