House-hunting

Our first glimpse of the Manoir de Raynaudes was through freezing drizzle, at dusk on New Year’s Eve 2001. It had been a long, depressing day of viewings, and as we came down the hill from the main road, I could pick out a lake, a stand of poplars and the tall, elegant shape of a house. It was the 36th property we had looked at over the course of seven visits to the area during late summer, autumn and early winter. We had seen the lot - farmhouses half buried in mud, twee converted barns, d-i-y nightmares and dilapidated châteaux. At one turreted wreck, the door was opened by a distressed woman in her fifties who insisted no, her home was not for sale, her estranged husband would have to murder her first.