After this first house-hunting trip with Jen, the floodgates opened. I was ready to continue the search, this time with more knowledge of the process and how to organize a trip. 

Seeing homes in person made me realize that there were patterns to uncover. For example, there were certain home types I could search for that would meet our needs of being walkable to shops and restaurants with enough of a yard for Phoebe. Like the house in Bagnols-sur-Cèze with the gorgeous period features. This particular style is called a Maison-de-Maître, typically a large rectangular home built between 1850 and 1880 with high ceilings, fireplaces, and a generously sized garden.

So I went back to the websites to refine my search criteria adding in “Maison de Maître,” still with a broad geographic region. Basically, the entire country. After all, we were still trying to figure out exactly where we wanted to land!

This time, I found a lovely Maison-de-Maître in a town 2 hours south of Paris in a small town called Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire. Quite the mouthful! But this house was a gem and I instantly clicked the button to reach out to the realtor. It had an “exclusive mandate” too, which meant that only one realtor could show the house. This is another distinction I’ve noticed from buying or selling a house in the US – frequently multiple realtors will have the right to advertise and show the same house!

The realtor got back to me right away, and we set a date to meet up a couple weeks later. She gave me the address to a bookstore on a corner as opposed to the actual house location. This is common, as sometimes the house can be hard to find or they want to control the experience of you coming upon it. 

Of course, not having an address wouldn’t stop me from finding the home’s location. I started digging around on Google Maps and within a few minutes, I spotted the house. It had a huge walled yard and was just a couple of blocks away from the center of town. Then I used Google Street View to cruise the streets and get the lay of the land. The centrality to shops and restaurants was much better than the other house we’d looked at, and it was just a quick walk to the Loire – much like our town of Nürtingen in Germany. I had a good feeling about this place!

Like all the homes that caught my eye, the interior was absolutely divine. As I flipped through each of the extra photos the realtor sent my way, I was drawn to the details. Deep green tiles in one shower room with gold fixtures. Colorful furniture and art that popped against the refined blue hues on the walls and wainscoting. My hunch was that this was the home of another interior designer (like Katya from Bagnols-sur-Cèze) – and I was right! The realtor confirmed that the wife had spent a couple of years renovating this noble building as their forever home, and the only reason they were selling was because of divorce. Since they’d had no intention to move, they’d spent much more than they could get back out of the home. Even the new roof alone was over €100k! Meticulously renovated with no work to do but move in?

I couldn’t wait to go see it…