Note: this entry is inspired by the ‘weekend of patrimony’ in France (this weekend) when many of the great buildings are opened free to the public.

Our daughter has just started her second year at lycée and one of her subjects is history. Turns out her history teacher is in training to be an architect, so architecture is taking rather more importance that you might expect and a trip to the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao is part of the course.

If you have never seen it, the Bilbao Guggenheim is a very beautiful modern building – but no obvious link with French history springs to mind.

As part of this pursuit of history and architecture she has been set the task of photographing an interesting building close to home, so I dragged her off to see my favourite local building (shown above). This property has already been years in renovation, and I suspect the work will carry on for several years more – it is a listed building, sowork has to be of high standard, and is very expensive to do.

The fascinating thing about the building is that it is really two structures.

There is an inner ‘maison en empilage’  i.e. a 14th century house built more or less by lying big logs on top of each other, when the Lot-et-Garonne was still covered in dense forests. These houses only exist within about a 25km radius of where we live, and nowhere else in France, and are among the oldest dwelling houses in Europe (castles, caves and troglodyte dwellings don’t count).

But then somebody a few centuries later, perhaps in the 16th-17th centuries, had the bright idea of adding a modern extension and has ‘wrapped’ the original house with new walls to give more space and a balcony around the upstairs. On the picture above you can barely see the original house, which looks rather like this:

So perhaps that is what would have passed for a contemporary extension 400 years ago. I can’t imagine what the neighbours would have said about the owner, getting above his station and turning his hut into a manor house, or what the planning authorities said when they saw the plans…

I would also guess that the absence of almost all windows means the owner’s lighting bills are a bit high in these properties.

Mrs B tells me our next house will be something trendy and modern and covered with solar panels (or else the local Maison de Retraite) but I do have a hankering for a Romeo and Juliet balcony every time I see it.