This is a moment of limbo. We are in the countdown to departure for a two-month break, six weeks of which will be spent in south-west France. While we are there, there will be AirBnB guests in our home. Today, we and the house are in chaos, though it’s mercifully finite. We know that order will prevail, because it has to.
This is the fifth year running that we have spent the summer this way. It was Sarah’s idea. She was brought up in the French Alps and she needs a regular fix of France and French culture to feel complete. The income from letting our own house, combined with what, in 2022, was the novel potential of continuing to work on Zoom while away, offered us the chance to spend much longer in Europe than we had ever done before.
Still, the thought of letting strangers into our home seemed very daunting that first year. Would they look after it and respect it? How many of our personal possessions should we put away? Would anyone want to come anyway? How easy would the online part of the process be to manage? What were the bureaucratic requirements for becoming landlords?
Over the following months, the shape of this new pattern for summer fixed itself in our minds. We negotiated the challenges, practical and emotional, and the bookings started coming in. Two weeks before we were due to leave we both downed tools and set about preparing. As it turned out we needed every one of those twenty-eight days.
There were things to be fixed, paintwork to be touched up, industrial quantities of new linen to be bought, ditto loo paper, meetings to be arranged with the people who were going to do the changeovers and look after the garden, and so on ad infinitum it seemed. On D-day we mopped our way out of the back door, exhausted, moments before the first guest arrived.
When we returned after the summer the house was still standing, nothing seemed to have been broken, nothing was missing, we had money in the bank – quite a bit more than our time away had cost us, and there were a lot of very appreciative messages in the guest book. This was something we hadn’t anticipated: the house was giving people pleasure. It was adding something to their holiday beyond just the provision of a roof and beds.
A house is a continual work-in-progress. We have been in this one for twenty-three years, longer than either of us have ever lived anywhere else. The improvements we have made have been gradual and we have no idea how someone who walks in for the first time will experience it. Seeing our home through the eyes of strangers has come to give us a great deal of pleasure. We are sharing something we have created and are proud of.
In the years since 2022 we have become almost blasé. We are more trusting of our guests. We put less away. We have come to realise that the more they experience the house as a lived-in family home – as opposed to a soulless, bought-to-let holiday house – the more they are likely to treat it well, and the more they will enjoy it; notwithstanding our ‘eclectic’ collection of art (mostly by family and friends), as one American guest described it, a little cattily we thought.
We have only had one nasty moment. Two years ago we were driving a twisty mountain road in the Cévennes when the phone went. It was the incoming tenant. My heart dropped to my knees as she enquired, almost apologetically, if there were meant to be garbage bags at the back door and a pile of dirty linen in the utility room.
It was five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. We were lucky that Kelly, who does the changeovers, responded and was able to get straight round to the house and save the day. Kelly keeps Clydesdales. Her enormous foal, having earlier stood on and broken her foot, had now stood on her phone and she had lost her calendar. All this she explained to the tenant who with good grace accepted her apology, along with a generous discount from us, and in the end gave us a five-star review. Phew.
Today week we’ll close up and leave with the car packed to the roof. A few days later the first party of guests – eight people we have never met, and will never meet – will walk through the front door to share a little of the imprint we have made on this place over the last nearly quarter-of-a century.
We love this house and its garden, and we have poured a lot of love into it. Some of that, surely, will transmit to our guests and lend a dash of je ne sais quoi to their holiday.
A Few Kind Words 