Le Puech Haut at Real, Roquemaure
It always takes a while of looking at different houses to know what you want, to get your eye in, as they say.
Le Puech Haut was the 32nd house we inspected, but when we saw it, we knew immediately. Even though it was uninhabitable and needed everything doing, it had the one thing which you can't add or restore to a property – its lovely position. It sits at the top of a gentle hill, (a Puech in the language of Oc) with long untroubled views leading down and across a valley, south to Roquemaure and the Pyrenees.
We first saw the house in March 1991, signed the compromis within the week, and bought it few months later. It was important for us to be not too far from Toulouse as I was working around Europe and we would fly in for weekends – my wife from London and I from wherever I had to be - as often as we could.
But it was nearly two years before we could move in. Although the walls and roof were OK, inside it was virtually a ruin; water was running through the ground floor, and the floors of the upstairs had given way under the weight of the grain which was stored there. The farmer had lived in just two rooms. The building was carefully restored by one of the best of the local Macons, J-P Ubaldi, whose company is mostly now restoring cathedrals and abbeys.
The first stage of the restoration in 1992-93 covered the halls and four rooms on the ground floor and the long landing and four rooms upstairs; The house needed complete renewal of the exterior, the windows, walls, shutters, interior walls and all the heating, water and electrical services. In the kitchen, it took eighteen sacks of sand for the sandblaster man to clean the grime and grease which had stuck to the beams around the huge old fireplace, after 140 years of cooking over it.
Upstairs we inserted bathrooms between the large 2nd and third bedrooms, and made what is now the fourth bedroom into our own bathroom and dressing room. At that first stage, in 1992-3, we decided to wait to restore the former lean-to at the east end of the house, where the goats and sheep were kept. It had fallen away from the main house and we just had to clear away the rubble and put off restoring it until we could afford the time and money to do it, which turned out to be much later.
During the 1990s and early 00s we did some restoration every year - what had been the chicken house and rabbit hutches, became a summer pavilion- the "Casbah"; we renewed the roof, upstairs floor and timbers of the garage; we planted the orchard and the garden, and in 2002, we put in the pool with a huge deck in teak lookalike ( it's a Canadian pine but wears identically)
The long halls are a wonderful feature of these houses, and at the South door of the landing, we installed a balcony which we found in an old architectural junkyard, while at the front and back doors downstairs, we had solid oak front and back doors made, in the Tarn style, which quickly acquired the patina of time.
Over the years, we started making a real green and white garden out of what had been fields to the front and back of the house, and had a post and rail fence put in to stop our neighbours horses wandering over to say hello. By 2002, with bamboo and more than 50 trees planted, it was beginning to look like a civilised patch instead of a wild field - but we kept one side to the East in its original wild state for the view and so that the nightingales in the thicket below would not be disturbed in their nightly serenades.
Then, once we both retired in 2003, we consulted the architect Kristian Wolff to restore the old barn/stables across the North lawn, to make the guesthouse and guardian apartment Le Beffroi [ The Clockhouse]. And yes, we bought a real church clock from the oldest established manufacturer – and ours runs on electronic beams.
At the same time, in the main house, we finally put in two additional bathrooms, breaking through into the upstairs of the large barn/garage, so that we would have four bed/four baths in the main house. Now we have four bedrooms and bathrooms n the main house, and with three in Le Beffroi and one in the Casbah, we can now sleep 15 in eight bedrooms and seven bathrooms.
While this was going on, we restored the original kitchen lean-to which had fallen away so many years before, which added a room 5 metres by 12 and doubled the size of the kitchen. It is now very much the heart of the house, in both summer and winter. Kristian Wolff had the huge arched door for the kitchen made to our design, in a modern metal framework, which contrasts well with the traditional Rabastens brickwork style. It was a great challenge as the arch had to be as high as possible to make its curve look elegant, but still had to fit under the beam supporting the sloping roof. The solution was to make the glass doors in the shape of the arch, with three strong hinges, instead of the usual square door positioned under a fixed window in the curving arch.
Later, we re-landscaped the field to the north of the house, and put in the new gates and improved the drive up to the house - We also laid a garden around Le Beffroi so that guests there would have their own private area, with their own path up to the pool. Finally, of course, since we had learned that in France every community, if they can find any budget, loves to put in an extra roundabout, we put one in to separate the drive to Le Beffroi and Le Puech Haut. It is being planted with rosemary.
When we built the pool, we surrounded it with seven olive trees, six about thirty years old and one very much older which is on the deck. Of course we put them there originally because with their age, they made the pool area look calm and serene, but the side benefit was that once the trees were comfortable and bedded in, they started to produce olives. We had more that 50 kilos the first year which we cured and preserved, and then the second year, and since then, we pick the olives at Christmas time and send them down to a mill further south, giving us about 14 litres of our own cold-pressed virgin oil.
Now, we have decided to sell our home to take on another project in Italy -and we hope the new owners will love the property as much as we have.
In the last seventeen years, it's not just here on our property that things have changed. In those days one car an hour went past the end of the lane, and a friend who stayed here then started listening out for them, he said, to be sure he hadn’t gone deaf. These days its more, maybe four an hour, sometimes five.
Copyright (c) ADSS 2009
