The woman in the bakery hands me my loaf and asks if it’s my first time in the village. I just smile at her, non-committal. ‘You’ll be back!’ she predicts cheerfully.
I certainly will. In fact, I’ve been back hundreds of times already, having owned a second home here for 12 years – but she’s not to know that. I have no profile locally, no friends or colleagues. I haven’t joined any clubs or Facebook groups.
The way I breeze in and out, leaving my property empty for months on end, makes me everything communities in British beauty spots detest – locals call us ‘blow-ins’, ‘DFLs’ (down from London) and other less printable names.
Just as well my place is in France, then. And just as well the bakery is a boulangerie, the loaf a baguette, and the village Saint-Martin-de-Ré on the ravishing, windswept Ile de Ré, jewel of the French Atlantic Coast. Because I would never dare buy a holiday home in Britain.
The Cornish fishing port of Mousehole, which teems with short-term lets, is a tourist hotspot
For all of you whose memories of summer staycations are fading fast, nothing left but a few rogue grains of sand in your trainers, I’m going to take a wild guess: Before you left your favourite little bit of Britain, you spent a happy hour checking out the prices in estate agents’ windows? Dreaming that next year’s break might not be in an Airbnb or hotel but in your very own home from home?
Well, my advice is to think long and hard before taking your ambitions from Rightmove to real life because second home owners in the UK – some 712,000, according to the Department of Levelling Up (2021/2022) – have never been more vilified. The lockdown lust to escape the city sent property prices in holiday hotspots soaring, effectively preventing locals from owning or securely renting their own home.
Back when my husband, Andrew, and I bought our place in France, owning a second home wasn’t controversial. Thatcher’s children from modest backgrounds, we bought our first flat at an affordable price, upgraded to a house when the children came, then reached our 40s and looked around for status symbols to acquire. It was aspirational, not immoral.
We discovered Saint-Martin-de-Ré – famous for its UNESCO world heritage site fortifications, quayside ice cream emporium La Martinière and les ânes en culottes (donkeys in pyjamas) – in the Noughties when I was looking for a remote location for one of my characters to disappear to.
Later, I set a whole book there – another missing person mystery. Evidently, it struck me as a good place to lie low, so when I dreamed of a hideaway of my own it was natural to house hunt there. We bought a quirky little place in the tangle of old streets near the port, so discreet it doesn’t have a front, only a door between two shops that leads to a hidden house out back.
Author Louise Candlish writing in her second home in the French village of Saint-Martin-de-Ré
Cue a dozen years of under-the-radar easy holidaying, of riding the 100km of cycle paths and walks through ancient pine forests and salt pans. Wine from local vines, oysters from our own waters, early Ré potatoes (very like Jerseys). And just us.
‘It’s almost as if we’re on a witness protection scheme,’ Andrew said last winter, when we were in our fourth week of blustery beach walks with the dog and had had no meaningful conversation with anyone but each other.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it great?’
It helps that we don’t speak French. Ignorance is bliss in a way it never could be back home in, say, Cornwall, the nearest equivalent to the Ile de Ré. England’s rugged south-western tip is hands down the epicentre of the UK holiday home crisis, with 21,120 locals languishing on housing waiting lists while some 13,000 second homes and Airbnbs stand empty for much of the year.
Graffiti and placards with the slogan ‘First Not Second Homes’ are a common sight in places like St Ives. Celebrity invasions don’t help. Remember Gordon Ramsay’s ill- advised comment about ‘hating the Cornish’ when relocating to his place in Daymer Bay during lockdown? (He sold up soon after.)
Well, now Cate Blanchett has found herself in hot water mere steps from the icy seas that attracted her in the first place.
She bought a cottage in chocolate-box pretty Mawgan Porth only to set about demolishing it in favour of an ambitious new property. Following local fury, she’s scaled back her plans.
‘Always be sensitive,’ says Emma, 48, who has owned her place in picturesque Marazion, near Penzance, for nine years. She bought a historic property that had been slow to sell and was scrupulous about using local builders and craftsmen to restore it. Properties like hers are often unsuitable for young families, being expensive to renovate and far from transport links.
Emma advises spending as much time in a second home as you can manage, especially off season, to avoid accusations of being part of the great ‘hollowing out’. ‘Being there in the short, dark days means you’re not just a fair-weather visitor,’ she explains.
Get it wrong and you risk reprisals beyond the odd unfriendly placard. Emma knows second- home owners who’ve had their tyres slashed simply because their number plate identifies a London garage or had their property coated in bird seed to attract seagulls, who will then cover it in their mess.
In the Lake District, another oversubscribed beauty spot, police recently investigated threats of arson over the message ‘F*** your Second Home’ printed on stickers alongside an illustration of a house on fire.
Saint-Martin-de-Ré sits on the windswept Ile de Ré, jewel of the French Atlantic Coast
In our little corner of France, this sort of hostility doesn’t exist. Separated from the mainland by a toll bridge, the Ile de Ré sees its population swell from 20,000 to 250,000 in summer, before shrinking again as the sunseekers and seasonal workers move on.
The rhythm seems to suit us all, with grown-up children leaving not because they’re priced out but because they are ready to head for the city.
For our UK counterparts, there are political measures to keep people like us out. Trusts prohibit property passing to anyone but those who intend using it as their principal home. A stamp duty surcharge of 3 per cent is applied to second homes. And now, double or even triple council tax is levied in some areas.
Hit the privileged blow-ins where it hurts and they might sell up, is the strategy.
But for the vast majority, including me, buying a holiday home made no financial sense in the first place. The value is emotional, tied up in that dreaded phrase ‘making memories’.
Our house in Saint-Martin costs about 4,000 euros a year to run, which compares favourably to, say, a family summer holiday to Florida. But the overall outlay far exceeds the cost of a holiday rental or hotel. And when we sell, we probably won’t get back what we paid.
I’m known for my domestic noir thrillers, so holiday home-owning, with its ripped-from-the-headlines moral dilemma and baked-in tension and conflict, was a natural subject for me to tackle. But much as I love my French bolthole, my new novel, Our Holiday, could only ever have been set in England.
I based my fictional village of Pine Ridge on a place I visit regularly, Studland in Dorset, reached via a chain ferry from glitzy Sandbanks (where there is a house currently on the market for a shade under £15 million).
Studland is lower key, with National Trust beaches and hikes along the clifftop to Old Harry’s Rocks or inland to Corfe Castle.
The blue-flag beaches are a haven for families, with pedalos and paddle boarding and even a sauna hut and seaweed baths on the beach. It stirs the same feeling in me as the Ile de Ré, the feeling that seduces second home owners and holiday makers alike: that you’ve finally stumbled on your happy place.
There’s a charming fisherman’s cottage for sale there right now, just feet from the beach, with a thatched roof, original beams, lovely old chimney breasts…
But, no, I’m stepping back from the estate agent’s window. There are plenty of people out there who are far more deserving of this piece of paradise than I am – not least those for whom this home would be their first.
Our Holiday is out now in paperback (£9.99, HQ)
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