About Us

I would like to introduce ourselves, Teresa & Ian at your service.  Thank you for dropping in to our website and I hope you’ve liked what you’ve seen. When we left the UK for France in November 2003, it was with little more than a dream and the cash from the sale of my house in Bognor Regis but we’ve come a long way since then. It took us a complete year to totally renovate the 3 sections of the longere I named Les Quatre Clès after the 4 ancient keys I was given on completing the purchase.  It was hard graft 24/7 and included a whole new roof, an all water filter bed, getting mains water installed, re-wiring, new wooden floors and stairs in all 3 units as up to then the only access to the 1st floor had been by ladder through the windows,  insulating and plaster-boarding the roof, fitting 3 kitchens, 3 double bedrooms and 2 twin rooms, 3 wood burning stoves and I’ll never forget the look on the salesman’s face in Bricomarché when we loaded up 6 toilets on our trolley.  We had 5 windows to put in and 3 doors, 3 patios to lay and 3 dividing trellises to put in and plant up. I use the word ‘we’ loosely, as really it was Ian doing all the building work with me as the gofer/cook/admin (we’d started renting out Ian’s cottage by then)/gardener and general dogsbody.
We started in April 2004 and lived in a mobile home at a local camp site until July. By then la glycine had the downstairs bedroom and bathroom finished so we moved in and used an old caravan (now my garden shed) as our kitchen & living area. As soon as the rest of La glycine was completed we abandoned the caravan, although I continued to use it as my office, and moved in 100%. As soon as the last and smallest section was finished we moved over and prepared La glycine & Le chèvrefeuille  for guests. I used to laugh at people in TV programmes rushing about like headless chickens minutes prior to guests’ arrival, I assure you they now have my every sympathy and understanding. For every job done there were still endless others waiting, but after two 12 hour days and much stress, I emerged broom in hand just 15 minutes before our first guests made their appearance.

However hard that year was, the sense of satisfaction when we’d finished made it all worthwhile and seeing the happiness on our guests’ faces when we show them around now doubles that pleasure and brings back our sense of achievement. We feel privileged to be able to provide the setting for a wonderful holiday experience and we only have to read our guest books to know that we must be doing something right.
Since we opened Les Quatre Clès for business in April 2005, Ian’s finished the extension to his cottage which provides a lovely large sunny separate living room and also finished renovating the cider atelier which is now our last gite – le camélia and our first ‘official’ guests (my two sons gave it a test run over Christmas 2008) stayed there in May 2009. 

Never one to laze around doing nothing, Ian’s now challenging himself by building a play house in the shape of a Sussex barn made almost entirely out of reclaimed pallet wood. He got the pallet bug after making an eggstrodinary hen house (sorry) which we hope to have occupied by spring 2010 providing us and guests with fresh eggs.
Now it all seems so long ago that it all began with me watching ‘A place in the sun’ and realising that the money that Ian had mouldering away in a building society and which wouldn’t even buy a kennel in the UK, could get us a nice holiday home in France. After an unsuccessful house hunting trip, we found the cottage in French Property News small ads when we returned. It was love at first sight – Ian took one look at the e-mailed photo of 8 Rue St Fiacre and the rest is history. He was on the next boat to France to meet the Welsh owner and shook on the deal, 2 months later it was his.

Over the next 2 years we made many improvements because although habitable, (it had a downstairs bedroom and bathroom, a new wood burning stove and oak stairs going to the loft), the previous owner had made do with a sink, a fridge and a camping stove so the first thing to get done was the kitchen. Once that was installed, Ian decided to attack the loft next.  Up to this point it was an empty space, with one small section used as a makeshift spare bedroom and that had been knotty pined to death. After that was stripped off, we enjoyed the bonfire.  Ian next raised the bottom horizontal beam of the oak A frames to give better head room and decided that the best use of the space was to create a double bedroom with en suite shower room and a small separate sitting room/office area (that eventually became the single bedroom). Ian forged ahead with partitioning the space, he used old oak beams to create the walls, skylight frames, banister and even made oak doors to complement the house. He also put in a beautiful finishing touch to the en suite shower room by installing a couple of stained glass panels in the dividing wall.

We also felt that the downstairs living space would benefit from having the old 50s pine ceiling removed to give extra height and reveal the beams.  As with most good intentioned plans, getting the sequence right is all. We had a lovely new kitchen that was then deluged with ancient cosy wrap, dust and desiccated mice as Ian took down the ceiling. It had to be the most disgusting job I’d ever had to do – gather up and bag the wrap – even worse than changing nappies! The last thing to be done (had to wait for planning permission) was the construction of a second dormer window to balance the original and allow a view of the garden from the bedroom.

We worked on the garden, trying to create something beautiful from the wilderness of nettles and brambles – pulling up nettle roots is so satisfying – how sad is that? Anyway we eventually won the battle and started to plant shrubs, fruit trees and anything else I could lay my hands on, if ever there had been a time for Alan and his groundforce team to come over – that was then. A new patio was laid, a new drive created, a traditional well was built over what was a hole in the ground and Ian started his plan to enlarge the otherwise sorry looking lean to.