Letting Go of the Château
Making grownup decisions—and selling the dream
Back in 2014, when I first came to the Médoc to do a story for Condé Nast Traveler, I had no reference for the region other than grand cru wines like Lafite and Margaux. I knew nothing of its beautiful Atlantic beaches, just an hour north of Cap Ferret, or how cool and exciting Bordeaux was. We fell madly in love with the area, especially after we saw how inexpensive (and good) the housing was, and immediately started looking for a place to buy. We were impulsive—we had no idea there were actual benefits to buying something in France. (I wrote a post all about it here.) We also naively assumed that we could get a loan to buy a house there. (No mortgages were available—we had to do some creative borrowing in the States to make it happen.) And we never imagined that we’d ultimately get French residency by buying real estate, which broadly means no 90-day limits on being in the EU, and at some point, healthcare. We just loved the idea of having a house in France, and jumped in blindly. Below, I’m going to get into as much as I think belongs in a Substack post and not in a book. There’s a reason that people write books and movies about living abroad.
If you’ve been following me on my personal Instagram, you might know that a couple of years ago, we bought my dream house in France. No, not the one we bought in 2015, another one. (To make it easy to follow, let’s call the original house Maison Médoc—or, the little house—and the new dream house Château Médoc—the big house.) We spent several years doing a gut reno on Maison Médoc, taking two small village townhouses and combining them into one. The project was tough—neither of us spoke very decent French, and we were living full time in NYC. But even if it was stressful (then again, what renovation isn’t?), we had a blast filling the house—finding all the furniture at the brocantes and antiques shops. It’s been finished for a little more than six years and we love it so much, but we developed a little itch for something new.
There was this house in Couqueques (“koo-kek”), the next village over—a beautifully situated château in the middle of a very large walled garden that I always admired, almost lusted after. It was on the edge of town, surrounded by vineyards, with a field across the street that was the domain of a single white horse. It was clear that nobody lived in it, and hadn’t for some time—quite Grey Gardens—and had a little hand-painted sign that said “A.V” (á vendre—for sale, with a phone number). At one point I was so curious about it, I asked a friend to call, and she said whoever had picked up had immediately hung up. Other neighbors said that they’d heard the old man who owned the house didn’t really want to sell it. So it just remained this mystery, and whenever we drove past it, I made Matt stop. I’d get out and take a photo, then wistfully get back in the car, and mutter “someday that will be mine.”
(Here’s a video peek of what I fell in love with)