My husband Matt and I were both the kind of kids whose parents often said, “We just don’t know where they came from.” We shared a love for classic ‘80s music (mine leaned more Euro-disco and his more UK cool); he obsessively watched the Tour de France, saved up for Fila, ordered Heineken instead of Bud in college, and his first car was a BMW Bavaria. Meanwhile, I was the kid buying French Elle in the international bookstore, and my first mode of transport was a P200 Vespa painted in the Italian flag colors, soon followed by a 1971 Citroen DS21, which always broke down. To be clear, we were not rich kids—far from it. We just worked hard and saved our own money. Our parents were kids of the ‘60s—dreamers. Our dads were both self-employed: Matt’s a sign painter and mine a piano teacher. Their dreamer ways meant we weren’t squashed or pressured into jobs that made money—they wanted us also to chase our dreams. Which brings us to the house in France.
Matt and I have separately and together always wanted to live in Europe, and to someday have our own place here. It happened quite accidentally that we ended up buying our house in France, in the Médoc region, best known for its Bordeaux wines—a peninsula with the Gironde River on one side and the Atlantic on the other. We were on an assignment for Condé Nast Traveler, doing a story on the region with cookbook author Mimi Thorisson, who used to live there, and while driving around the area we did what we often do in a place we’ve never been to—we fell in love. There was a lot of excitement building up around the region: the TGV was going to start a route between Paris and Bordeaux, shortening the journey significantly (2 hours from 4), which meant that more families would relocate to the area. We couldn’t believe how beautiful and empty the beaches were, and how magical the whole area felt. We started looking online, and had a local agency looking for us, too. This was back in 2015, when Matt was in Europe a lot for work, so he went to look at different properties, and we ultimately settled on buying two adjacent village houses in St Yzans de Médoc.
The reason I’m putting all this down is because so many of you have asked how we did it. I can’t say it was easy. I often compare the process to childbirth—not fun, sometimes awful, but so great in the end that you forget how hard it was. However, there are things I wish I had known before we pulled the trigger, and I’m going to tell you those here. I’m no expert—and the rules and legalities change frequently—so I’m just speaking from my own experience here; you can (and should) factcheck this if you’re seriously looking. Google will be your best friend when you’re trying to figure all this out.
Owning property in France doesn’t mean you get residency. The same goes for Italy. If you buy property in Greece, Portugal, or Malta, you do get residency benefits. Having property in France does make it easier to get a visa, which is the first step in getting residency, but we naively thought it meant we had some kind of entry privileges, which, during lockdown, we discovered wasn’t the case.
Don’t buy a house in France just to flip it. You’ll pay a ton in taxes, but the percentage drops the longer you hold onto the house. However, as long as you hold onto the house, property taxes are surprisingly low.
Where to look? It’s a big country, so you have to dig deep and ask yourself what’s important to you: village life, the sea, mountains? An already established area, or more off the beaten path? Budget? I’m always attracted to lesser-known areas because I love the discovery, and it’s always going to be less expensive. But it’s also a gamble, because if you want to rent it out, it may be more challenging to get people interested in an area they aren’t familiar with. Ditto for if/when you want to sell it.
Getting a loan isn’t impossible, but figure it out before you find the house! We ended up paying cash for our two little houses as they weren’t expensive, but the renovation was 3x the purchase price, and we had spent all of our money! We had heard that once you own property in France you can more easily get a loan there, but we spent months trying to get one with LCL, only to be denied. I ended up getting a home-equity loan with an online bank called Sofi—it was incredibly easy (I actually just paid it off at the end of 2021!), and it and got us to where we could move forward with the renovations. We still needed another loan beyond that, so we called our friends Sharon and Paul Mrozinski, who own several properties in the Luberon, and they reminded us that way back they had told us we were going to need a broker in order to get a loan. We finally took their excellent advice, the broker got us a very low-interest-rate loan with Bred bank, and we were able to finish the project. While France and Italy may not give you residency, they are both countries that will give non-residents loans, and often at interest rates that are in the 2% range.
Don’t take the first contractor you’re introduced to! This brings me to another point: find someone immediately who can act as your translator/caretaker/local friend. If you are going into an area cold, with no local friends, ask your realtor to help you find someone. Even if your French is perfect, you will want someone local to help you manage the project. Once you have this person in place, make sure that you get several contractors to estimate the project, and ask for references, which you must check. We did NONE of this, and the drama that we went through is something I wouldn’t want anyone to have to deal with. We aren’t planning on writing a book about our experience, but trust me, it’s the kind of stuff you read about.
Making sure you have a caretaker/friend is so important. We couldn’t have this house without Corinne, who makes sure that the heaters aren’t blasting all winter when we aren’t there (heat is so expensive), and manages any renters, deliveries, and gardening issues. We haven’t rented our house out much because we wanted to wait until we felt it was really ready (pool took ages to figure out!), but if buying to rent it out is a big part of why you’re looking—make sure you do your research on how you properly report and deal with that.
Once you’ve found the house and it’s on its way, the fun starts. There’s nothing like going to a flea market in France (I’ll do a post on that soon) and actually having a reason to buy all the things you can to fill it up! (If you want to follow along on our adventures with the house, it has its own IG account @maisonmedoc)
