28 C O N T E X T 1 1 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 1 PETER FISHER Restoring a house in France Success depended on understanding the unfamiliar ways of the notaire, the maçons, the maire and the menuisier – and some French technical vocabulary. In the spring of 2001, my wife and I accepted an invitation to a friend’s 50th birthday party in the Corbières*. We both decided that we liked the area and that we would like to look for a house ourselves, though it was not something that we had ever thought about previously. After looking at several houses in the area, as well as a couple in the Hérault, north of Béziers, we settled on a house in the small village of Albières. The high value of the pound against the franc at that time (it was just before the introduction of the euro) made it an attractive proposition. In the autumn we signed up at the office of the local notaire and for some £40,000 we obtained a spacious maison secondaire. The house, thought to date originally from the 18th century but restored in the mid-19th, was built, like most old houses in the area, of random rubble stone, covered by a smooth lime render. (The local stone appears to be a mixture of grey limestone and orange/ red sandstone.) Ours is slightly grander than the average village house, its front elevation having a certain doll’s-house formality, but is far from being a maison bourgeoise. It was in good structural order – with walls some 70cm thick, this was to be expected. Some years before, it had been re-roofed in the local tuiles canales by a well respected village builder (sadly now dead) and the roof has remained sound since, surviving what can be severe winter weather. The house is set on a sloping site, its long axis almost parallel to one of the roads leading into the village, with its front windows overlooking the hills on the other side of the valley. Because of this slope, the house is split level, the rear rooms being some 80cm higher than the front. There were two rooms on the ground floor, two bedrooms and bathrooms on the first floor, and a grenier or attic at the lower (front) end of the house. The rear room on the ground floor had been a byre, with rough stone walls and large concrete bins for fodder.Water came in at one corner through a pipe fed from a spring. When we embarked on the renovation, no consents were required for any of the work as the house is not a monument historique, nor in a secteur sauvegardé (conservation area), though individual tradesmen have to follow their own normes françaises which, like the building regulations in the UK, can sometimes be a minor source of annoyance. One of the main problems was finding suitable tradesmen. The least said about the first maçon we engaged the better. We paid out money which appeared to go into a black hole as, every time we visited, little or nothing had been done. When we finally gave him an ultimatum, he took his bat home. We were then lucky enough to find an Irish builder who had moved to the village. He carried out or coordinated most of the work. Specialist tradesmen, such as electricians, plumbers and heating engineers are few and (literally) far between, and tend to be expensive.The possibility of obtaining competitive quotations is a rare luxury.We were extremely lucky in getting most of the work done when the pound was worth almost two euros and not its present rate of less than 1.2. Thought to date originally from the 18th century and restored in the mid-19th, the house is built of random rubble stone. Note *The Corbières are a mountainous massif lying to the south of the major valley and transport route between Toulouse and Narbonne and north of the Pyrenees. They lie in the Aude Département of the Languedoc-Roussillon region. The area is noted mainly for its wines, for having been a centre of Catharism in the 13th century – today a muchvaunted tourist attraction – and, in the particular case of the village of Rennes-le-Château, for its association with The DaVinci Code.
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