So, it's been a few years we've been looking at buying a house in the French Alps - Vero has family there and I have a deathwish [1] - but it seems that every time we go to look at stuff, the price has risen just above what we can afford. Such is the nature of looking for houses in a tourist region (although the same rule seems to apply in London, as far as I can tell).
As a result of this, on this year's annual snowboarding / family visiting trip, I had precious little hope of finding anything habitable in a reasonable price bracket. As an additional bonus, this year appears to have been pretty awful for snow too, which didn't bode well for the 'strapping a plank to the feet and jumping down a mountain' side of things either. Ah well, there's always the food and wine...
Having visited every agency in Megeve, life was looking pretty awful. Everything seemed to have doubled in price or more, meaning that prices were pretty much on a par with London [2]. Bearing in mind that our earning potential in France is somewhat lower than in England, this was rather depressing. Some of the agencies wouldn't even talk to us - we don't tend to wear furs or Armani so the faces obviously didn't fit. Eeeagh!
And then...
It snowed a bit, so I was busy in powder heaven, and we received a call from the 'friend of the family' estate agent - a 4 bedroom apartment in Flumet, going cheap for various reaons, would we like to go and visit? Well, Flumet's not Megeve, and we nearly cancelled, but we sort of dragged ourselves along anyway.
From the outside, it's not much to look at, but about 15 seconds after entering the apartment, it became apparent it wasn't going to be worth visiting anything else. This, apart from my friend's 1/4 million flat in Bermondsey, is absolutely the most amazing place I've ever seen. Well within the price bracket, too. So we signed. Sale should go through sometime later this year. Yay!!
The fucking sale fell through! What happened next!
So click here for some photos.
| tufthome | randomhome | Low Bandwidth Site | mail me |
[1] As you will, no doubt, have realised if you've looked at the powerkite section of this site. But in this context the deathwish tends to be more related to snowboarding.
[2] Well, maybe that's overstating it a little. 2-bedroom flats are still marginally less than FRF 2 million, in most cases, but it's close.
Last modified: Sat Feb 10 10:28:50 GMT 2001