French Life-expat France

When people buy a property in France to renovate, they are usually obsessed with authenticity. Period features are all important, and must be kept at all cost. Anything added in the last hundred years should be discarded. Old stone should be carefully restored, and left exposed for all to see. But sometimes it is interesting to look at these old buildings a little more carefully.The ‘exposed stone’ look that we all love and carefully restore is not, in fact, how the building was originally made. The stone was almost always covered with lime mortar, albeit quite roughly, to help protect the building.

Similarly with colombage (half-timbered) buildings. Nowadays these are carefully restored so that the wood is visible, and usually protected with oil or varnish. Totally beautiful, and a key feature of the medieval buildings that are sprinkled across France, especially in Normandy and Lot-et-Garonne. But again, this is missing authenticity. The wood would originally have been covered with lime mortar to protect it.

OK so lets look at shutters. Every house in France has shutters, more or less. Apart from anything else, insurance demands it. Now, take a look at some shutters. Is the house more than 200 years old? Shutters were only in common use after that time, so if you see an ancient cottage in the countryside, it should not have shutters. Do the shutters have diagonal ‘cross-bars’ to support them? Sorry, that’s another modern invention. The shutter struts shoule be horizontal, without the additional diagonal support.

Take a look at the photograph at the top of this article, of this beautiful medieval house. Nice doorway. Look again. To the left of the picture you can see an old doorway, now blocked up. Look again. To the right of the picture you can see an original ‘arched’ doorway that has been blocked in to allow the current doorway to be added. Then on the upper level there are at least four windows that have been blocked up at some point in history.

Does all this change and alteration mean the house is a disaster? Not at all, although it is a bit lacking in windows. It is a beautiful house, improved by the blocked up doorways and windows that add to the impression of age and centuries passing.

So what does this teach us? That property change and alteration is not necessarily undesirable, as long as it is well done. It is not necessary to reopen all these windows, or to try and restore a building to how it was (or might have been) at some distant point in time. The important thing is to recognise that property renovation involves modifying a building, and to recognise that if this is done carefully the building will be no less attractive for it.

So if you are embarking on a property renovation in France, use sympathetic local materials whenever possible, but don’t be unnecessarily tied in to respect for the past. Change, if well done, can be just as effective.

See more information about Property Renovation in France.