One downside of getting English TV, apart from the difficulty of choosing what to watch from 100 channels of unwatchable rubbish, is that I have discovered that one channel seems to show a lot of re-runs of Grand Designs.
I always was a ‘Grand Designs addict’ and now it seems I have nine years of missed episodes to catch up on, which should keep me busy during the winter. This includes a sprinkling of episodes set around France, which are especially interesting to me.
Those of you who have visited this blog very often will know that we ourselves live in a large open-plan barn conversion that we renovated when we first moved to France. This was inspired in part by Grand Designs (1999 style) except our budget was rather smaller than most of the projects shown on the television show. Actually a lot smaller which is why I’m jealous when I see owners on the programme bring in marble flooring from Turkey, custom made furniture from Italy and spending more on a kitchen than we spent on the whole project. Another £500k and our place would be amazing!
But despite our more modest budget I still can’t watch Grand Designs without feeling the urge to rush into a local estate agents and buy a tumbledown shed for renovation, and I’m not sure I can get through a whole winter of watching without making an excessive offer on an isolated building plot at the end of a long gravel track miles from anywhere just so I can construct a great glass and concrete blot on the landscape.
Happily over the years I have discovered a couple of things that might be useful to people planning to construct their dream home in France:
1) Almost everyone designing their own house seems to make it far larger than necessary or sensible.
2) Almost no-one designing a new house succeeds in improving on traditional designs and techniques, even less on making it fit well in the natural environment. Unless you are a close friend of Daniel Liebeskind or Frank Gehry and they will sketch out plans for you. (And if you are Mr Liebeskind or Mr Gehry looking to do some free architectural sketches for a tobacco barn renovation in France I’ve got just the project for you…)
3) If you love the landscape, ask whether your planned build will improve it or not for other people. Traditional old houses don’t detract in anyway from their environment, they are part of it. Seems to me this is rarely the case with new buildings.
4) Just because your architect doesn’t say your plan is oversised and ugly doesn’t mean it isn’t oversized and ugly…they might well know it is a carbuncle but be too polite to mention it, or think it’s not their business to tell you what they really think as long as you keep paying the bills.
I’ve seen some enormous houses get built over the years that would fit better in the Dallas TV studios than southern France and the curious thing is – the owners often rush to sell them within a year or two when they realise what a mistake they made, leaving their lucky neighbours sat in the cool shade of an unoccupied version of Southfork Ranch and wondering what happened to the field of sunflowers that they used to look out on.
We live in a Conservation Area. Do they have this in france or does it all rest with the mayor. When we renovated our house The deal was that we had to replace the 1939 welch slate roof for traditional Norfolk Clay tiles as would have been on the original farm house before the fire of 1939. we did this and I must say it looks far better. we now have only one house in the village that has concrete tiles on. Things can be modern and fit in with what has gone before, but the council will insist they are changed if they want to make any changes to their house, even though no one can see it.So for some people that live in a listed building in a conservation area very little can be changed. Thank goodness.
There are some areas of France that have restrictions on buildings and how they look etc. There are also significant restrictions on where properties can be built in open countryside (generally planning permission isn’t given just to build a house in the middle of the countryside). But communes are allowed to designate areas for development (I think prhaps its obligatory that they do this), and also building is often allowed when there is any trace of a historical building on the site, even if it’s a complete ruin. It is these two ‘allowances’ that generally allow inappropriate new builds, certainly in this area and especially when some maires and departmental planning authorities seem unconcerned about the impact on the countryside of a large modern villa getting built.
When we renovated our own buildings we were told what roof tiles to use, what colour pointing for the stone walls etc – but then someone a few miles up the road has built a brand new house with none of these characteristics, so I don’t really understand how these things are decided.
It’s not what you know but who you know. That is the planning mantra in UK and France.
The Grand Designs are very often too grand for our pockets but they often show me the ‘error’ of having high ceilings, beams and lights that would be near impossible to de-cobweb, re-paint or even change a low enegy light bulb.
You’re certainly right about ‘It’s not what you know but who you know’.
In our own ‘barn’ the lights are all wall lights so changing bulbs isn’t a problem but getting rid of cobwebs with 6 metre ceilings does need a rather long pole!
Is a room without a celling very noisy in heavy rain. In the days when we were foolish enough to have a holiday in a caravan the noise in heavy rain was unbearable. Also the heat loss must be quite extensive as you are heating a huge area. The older I have become the more we have gone for economy and convenience.
Not too noisy, what with wooden planks, insulation, an air space, then canalite and canal tiles I guess it’s a bit more substantial than a caravan. During heavy storms we hear the rain but don’t notice it much at other times. Hailstones on the velux windows is very noisy though! As for heat loss, it’s pretty easy to heat and since it’s all open plan (except bedrooms/bathrooms) there’s no hot or cold spots. I guess it’s true that the bigger a place is the more it takes to heat it, but our roof area is probably no bigger than plenty of houses, it’s just that it’s all in one room! We light the wood-burning stove and it heats the whole space pretty easily (or turn the central heating on if we can’t be bothered to light the stove or want the bedrooms heated). It’s a great place to live!
8 years ago we bought the relics of an 18th century chateau standing on foundations of a much older chateau. We expected to have to comply with listed building requirements, but there have been none. We have extended, renovated, modified, always within the confines of the existing structures, without any intervention from the mairie or the region.
When we started the project we were contacted by a UK tv production company that wanted to film a series of programmes of ‘grand designs abroad gone horribly wrong’ and our project had already gone horribly wrong. But they wanted us to stage disasters and arguments, and then magically put everything right. We declined.
Nowadays I fuel the Victor Meldrew in me by watching the local farmers drive their enormous tractors ( instead of carthorses ) through the supposed local planning laws.
This is where you guys have it all wrong about french planning laws….the only real planning laws are what the marie (read local mayor) decides is OK or not….. except if you wish to do something within 500m of a church in which case they have a say in the matter too….
….Im not kidding…at least around here…