My husband and I quit our jobs and bought a 500-year-old hamlet in the French countryside. Here's how we transformed it into a successful rental business and our dream home.
Liz Murphy
- Liz and Dave Murphy left their 9-to-5 jobs and traded their city home for a 17th-century hamlet.
- They split the cost of the site with Liz Murphy's mother and her husband, paying 215,000 euros each.
- Now the family lives in the hamlet and runs other properties on the site as vacation rentals.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Liz Murphy, a 45-year-old owner of Lac de Maison, a 17th-century French hamlet and holiday rental. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
My husband, Dave, and I traded our detached house in Manchester for a 17th-century village in the French countryside in pursuit of a better quality of life.
We both had 9-to-5 jobs in copywriting and marketing, and life had become a mad rush of food, baths, and bedtime.
When COVID hit, we were both furloughed. It allowed us to reflect on our lives, and we realized how much time we'd missed with our kids, Charlotte and Tom, then 6 and 9.
On a whim in August 2020, we began looking at gîte businesses — vacation-rental homes in France — that were available to purchase. We dreamed about escaping to the French countryside.
Liz Murphy
We'd need a property with at least two gîtes to rent and two additional houses: one for our family and one for my mom, Helen, and her husband, Terry.
By September we'd found 10 locations that met our requirements. Luckily, COVID-19 travel restrictions had lifted that month, so we flew to France and visited several sites.
As soon as we pulled up the drive of Lac de Maison, a three-acre farmstead in the peaceful countryside of the Poitou-Charentes region, we knew it was the one.
Liz Murphy
The 500-year-old hamlet comprised an owner's home and three operational gîtes, with other derelict buildings on the site that could be renovated into additional gîtes. It also had a beautiful garden with chickens and goats.
We canceled the rest of our viewings and made an offer that day. We split the cost of the hamlet with my mom and her husband, who were joining us. The hamlet cost 430,000 euros in total. We paid 215,000 euros.
We financed the purchase by selling our house in England. Any profits beyond the price of the property went toward renovations.
Liz Murphy
Though we finalized the property purchase on December 15, 2020, we didn't begin physically moving to France until January 2021.
During that time, Brexit happened, changing all the rules and turning our move into a flurry of passports and spreadsheets.
The move cost us around 6,000 euros. But by the beginning of 2021, all six of us were in France.
We renovated 2 buildings while running the business
Our family moved into the biggest gîte, while Mom and Terry took the old owner's home.
Two weeks in, Mom and Terry realized that space wasn't suited to their purposes. And though we hadn't budgeted for it initially, they decided to pay for a renovation.
Liz Murphy
What started as a new bathroom became a complete overhaul, down to the bricks. Mom and Terry returned to the UK for about eight months while we completed the work.
We saved money by doing any labor we could — plaster, floor, roofs — an experience with a learning curve.
We'd purchased the property knowing the previous owners had a couple of bookings for spring and five or six for the summer, including the gîte we were living in. So when Mom and Terry left, we moved into their house.
We stayed in that house until the construction was so extensive that we had to move into a camper on the property that spring.
Liz Murphy
At the same time, we began hosting guests — the first experience either Dave or I had in hospitality.
The learning curve was steep, but since we both love people and had been on holiday before, we knew the kind of experience we wanted to deliver.
By advertising where French people look for their holidays, we generated enough bookings to stay afloat. We also decided to remain open in the winter, when the property had previously not been open.
All this was in preparation for renovating an old ruined barn into a four-bedroom gîte and taking over one of the existing gîtes as our home.
Liz Murphy
In January 2022, we braced ourselves for a loss of income as we took the large gîte off the market, moved into it, and began construction on the ruin.
This shell of a building had been empty for over 100 years — no rooms, no electricity, and no water.
Liz Murphy
Like with Mom and Terry's house, we did as much of the work as possible. We kept the original floors, and over nearly 10 months we turned everything around them into a new third gîte.
While we exceeded our 80,000 euro budget, it's been worth the investment. Today all three gîtes are fully occupied seven days a week from May through the beginning of September and every weekend the rest of the year.
Liz Murphy
We're done renovating for now, but we continue to make minor tweaks to our residence, transforming it from a rental cottage into our home.
Life in the countryside is wonderful
This old farmstead is so different from our neighborhood in the UK. Our nearest neighbors are a quarter-mile, not a doorstep, away.
A bigger village is just a bit down the road where the kids go to school. There's also a movie theater, a library, and a café.
The kids have been in a French school since day one. For the first six months they despised us, the school — the whole enterprise. Two and a half years later, they're both thriving and fluent.
Liz Murphy
Dave and I were lucky to meet the wife of our builder, a lovely English-French lady who helped us navigate the French bureaucracy — what I found to be the most challenging part of this entire process.
For example, you must fill out forms to reregister your child for the same school, with the same teacher, every year, even if nothing changes. I think it's just because the French like paperwork.
Liz Murphy
The B-and-B business allows us to live comfortably
We didn't move to France to make money. We know we'll never be able to make as much here as we did with our big jobs in the city.
But life is just better here. We can be there as our kids and my mom and Terry grow older. This business allows us to put family first.
We essentially traded the value of our house in Manchester for Lac de Maison, and in the countryside your money goes so much further. We don't have to buy eggs — we've got them on-site.
We knew that for the first two years we'd break even. This year we can save the money we're making in the summer to keep our income steady during the slower but still occupied winter months.
Liz Murphy
With no more construction planned, we'll hopefully start to reap the rewards of the money we've plowed into the business next year.
We've had our ups and downs, but it's been 100% worth it. Moving to France is the best decision we've ever made.
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