Its Christmas in rural France again
This post is a little bit about Christmas but mainly about the family who used to live in our french house long before us
So firstly, I have to discuss the fact that I have added a paid subscriber option to this newsletter from now. I am very happy for you to NOT pay and carry on reading for free as I appreciate at the moment things like fuel and heating might be taking precedence. But, I am now ‘freelance’ for the first time in my 30 year career and am finding numerous ways to make a living and this seems like a good one to add to my portfolio. In the paid for content I will be doing more practical tips and advice for those thinking of buying abroad or just renovating in the UK.
Getting to write more often has been a real blessing of leaving my full-time job - I’d actually forgotten how much I enjoy it and your positive comments on this newsletter alone have made me very happy so thank you. I’d really love to get more comments going on the paid front and hope that for some of you the extra content I’m going to do around renovations tips etc means you might want to share your stories of renovations either here or abroad.
I’m currently also doing up a house in London the progress of which you can follow on Instagram on @weboughtalondonhouse (see what I did there?) and it is roughly our 8th renovation. Somehow I am hoping all these different strands of life might pull together at some point - we’ve listed our London home as a shoot location and France is rented out via Airbnb so in some ways we are earning money from our renovations but I’d love to somehow combine writing and renovating and this is step one.
Anyway back to the stories!! This one is a funny tale of our home and it’s original inhabitants - The Mouledous. A giant french family whose name in our local area is well known as there were so many of them. 18 to be exact living in our house. Clearly there are many descendants still around and as the below blog details - we have run into them over the years. What the blog doesn’t mention though are the others who have found us via the internet and visited from the US just to see the house where their ancestors lived - yes this really happened they just turned up one day!
I love when people want to come and see how we’ve transformed the home their grandparents lived in and hope they appreciate how we’ve breathed life into something that had lain derelict for so long - in its latter stages it was home to an apparently not very nice man who was one of the 18 and somehow ended up there by himself smoking and drinking himself to death with his dogs.
We like to think we’ve given it back some of the family atmosphere it apparently once had and for the locals the reassurance that we came to be part of the village and not just swan in and out twice a year. Our housekeeper who looks after it for us and deals with our Air bnb guests lives in the village and used our house to take photos and host a drinks reception after her wedding. And many locals have rented it for their relatives to stay in as overspill for weddings or anniversary parties (apparently someone once actually hosted a party for about 100 people in the grounds while we weren’t there - they left it in spotless condition so we didn’t complain).
It is our house of course but it is and always will be a part of the local fabric and as so many rural french villages shift and change with new build bungalows becoming more favourable to the locals - keeping this Maison Du Maitre close to how it was intended has become more than just a place for us to holiday - we feel a responsibility to keep the spirit of it alive too.
Original post sometime in 2013
And before you know it, it was Christmas again – this time with partial heating AND my parents. In less than two years we had managed to take a house with no water, heating, walls or heart and turn it into a family home. A warm -ish, bustling, family home for the first time in twenty years. With noisy meals, heated games of table football and plenty of rowing about what time bedtime is. Regular, family stuff.
We had learnt by now via neighbours a little about the enormous french family who once lived in what we, the White family now refer to as La Maison Blanche (The White House see what we did there?) It was once home to a family called Mouledous. The Mouledous had eighteen children and they all lived in our house in Gensac. Like the old woman who lived in a shoe. There are now dozens of Mouledous scattered around the local area. There’s Dr Mouledous in Maubourguet who we have taken Seb to for numerous ear infections over the years.
Then, there is the genteel and elegant Francoise who is no longer a Mouledous by name as she married. She is a retired paediatrician and lives in a beautiful old windmill on the edge of our village and invites us over for aperitifs and speaks such posh French we can understand every word (unlike Serge our other neighbour, with whom a conversation is probably the French equivalent of a chat with Gazza). Francoise’ daughter is married to an English Dr and they live in Ealing with their three ‘English by birth but French by manners’ children.
Finally, the best Mouledous of all is Frank Mouledous. Frank recently returned to his family home in Maubourguet with his Hawaiian wife to open up rural France’s, one and only California surf shack, burger bar. Called The California Kitchen it’s the kids’ fave place to eat in France – go figure – but it’s not just the enourmous burgers which are made from scratch and delicious. Or the American style cheesecake which Mrs Frank makes from scratch and is delicious. Its not even the fact there is no loo at the California Kitchen so you have to run across the street to the Town Hall if you need a pee which the kids think is very cool. No, the big draw of the California Kitchen is the fact that Frank is a big bear of a man in a chef’s outfit who talks to the kids in a French/American accent. He might have stepped out of one of those dreadful shows they watch on the Disney channel where the Dads are always overweight and bufoony, and the Mums are naggy and in charge. And Frank always offers up free desert for which my children would happily follow the child catcher, never mind a man who could be Selena Gomez’s onscreen Dad!
So this Christmas we would have a family Christmas the like of which our still a bit shabby house had not seen for about twenty years or more. A Christmas to make the Mouledous memory proud.
Peter and the boys bought a huge tree that filled one ‘Kings Speech’ style corner of our salon.
And because we now had a concrete floor in the salon as opposed to the rats nests, we moved all Christmas operations into it. The table we normally use in the garden with a white linen tablecloth to disguise the fact it’s an outdoor table. And mistletoe found in abundance in our woods.
And my mum had brought onesies for the boys from Primark so they could feel cosy when they got up on Xmas morning to see if he’d been. Which of course he had.
And we could begin to see how our holiday home could actually be a real home. With a sofa, (Ikea natch) and lots of rooms that we could spread out into. We may not be a family of 18 but when all our new Mouledous friends pop round for a glass of wine and some cashews we hope they’ll be impressed. And perhaps explain where they all used to sleep! Because readers, next Xmas we’ve got our friends the Candys coming to stay and they are the closest thing to Mouledous we know as there are six of them! We may need a bigger goose!
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