Like many blogs this is a diary. It’s the diary of a dream we have cooked up over many glasses of wine, long car journeys and sleepless nights. It’s a dream we hope to turn into a reality over the next few years, and that we hope will become your dream holiday location.
Our dream is to start a glampsite. glamorous camping, luxury camping, posh camping, camping for snobs whatever you want to call it that’s what we dream about. We initially wanted to do it in the UK in Devon or Cornwall but a quick google search informed us that we can only just about afford a football pitched size piece of land. So we decided on France, our neighbours who have a better climate, better food and more affordable land prices. And the more we thought about it the more it made sense. We wanted an adventure and we’ve always wanted to learn another language so it just made sense.
Our French adventure started at the start of this summer 2014. Robin’s dad has a place in Northern France Le Mez which he bought 10 years ago intending to build chalets for art holidays with the legendary Anne Westcott. Unfortunately Peter got too ill to finish the project, Anne died and the house was left unfinished. Sad after so much of Peters hard work.
We visited Le Mez with stars in our eyes. The property could be ours for around £12,000! We had about £30,000 in the bank from my redundancy pay off ‘we were rich!’. We hopped on the ferry and drove to the property which was so overgrown we had to fight our way in through the brambles. The roof had collapsed and it was a bit too much work to restore, especially as Robin’s back has started to wear out from his many years of carpentry.
Not quite the luxury glamping experience we were going for!
The property came with 3 acres which we thought was huge until we saw it. We’ve since learnt that we need hectares (not acres) for our French glampsite. But the main thing was road noise, with the prevailing wind we could hear the dual carriage way and that spoilt our dreams of creating a peaceful glamping experience where people could get back to nature and feel rejuvenated. We wanted tweet tweet not zoom zoom.
While we were there we decided to view some other properties in the area, however we hadn’t arranged anything and as it was the weekend (and rural France) no estate agents were around. We managed to somehow locate another property we’d seen online (for around £20,000) god knows how we found it but from a terrible map & fuzzy iphone picture we somehow managed to locate property. which was also a compete wreck, had spooky caves, and a farmer firing shots in the next field. Na not for us merci!
at 20,000 Euro’s Its cheap!
The great thing about doing a project like this is that you learn so much. Even from this first virgin French trip we learnt so much A) we didn’t want to be in Northern France. B) In France an acre isn’t that much space, however in London its considered a huge garden! C) £30,00 is going to get us nowhere!
Back home and we really want to make this glampsite dream happen. we bang on about it to all our friends and decide that the only way to do it is to sell our London home. We spend millions of hours on the computer researching regions, other glampsites in france, emailing canopy & stars to see how busy they are, making budgets and I’m waking up in the night making pintrest boards because I can’t stop thinking about this campsite!
glampinginfrance 