A gite complex in Mauleon
When you sit in the two-bed roomed gite at Ian and Caroline Roulstones’ property in Mauleon, Deux Sevres, you would be hard pushed to envisage the starting point for this good looking, well laid out holiday home. It would be fair to say that this particular part of the project was originally an outhouse and a toilet block!!
The premise for this conversion project was the thought that buying a property in a town with potential for conversion to provide accommodation for groups of like minded people. Ian and Caroline are keen motor-cyclists and tour regularly with motor-cycle clubs and groups. The urban location was important as it allowed motor-cyclists to become pedestrians and find restaurants, bars and shops as diversions that do not need to be driven, ridden to. From this base a “wish-list” was drawn up, using their own knowledge and experience of what their thoughts of what constituted good practice when it came to holidays, tours, that they had enjoyed.
They were looking for a property with a family home for themselves and their two daughters, outbuildings that lent themselves to conversion for multi-occupancy, a garden with space big enough for a pool, and a part of the building that could provide a laundry, drying room for “bikers” clothing. All in a town for the above reasons. So not a lot to look for! When they found, in Mauleon, Deux-Sevres, a reasonably large “maison-maitre” with a further house and outbuildings in the large garden, it would be fair to say that many of their boxes had been well and truly ticked.
My involvement with Ian and Caroline then began, as Ian says
“When we bought our house and outbuildings in North Deux Sevres, we knew that when converting the outbuildings into gites, we wanted to keep control of the project as much as we possibly could. Both for the financial benefit and for the self-satisfaction we knew we would have when it was finished!
It was at this point that we read a Steve Davies’ series of articles on barn conversion on French entrée (now on http://renovateinfrance.co.uk/category/our-barn-conversion/). We contacted Steve, and met up to discuss what we felt we could do, and what Steve could do in terms of planning and project management. Our ideas coincided, and there followed the production of a planning dossier based on our ideas (which needed to be passed by Batiments de France), the organisation of materials, and then the works themselves. “
It was at this point that the exercise of getting plans discussed and draughted took off.
How this was done is the subject of article 2