Greg Kucera’s (semi)retirement in France
In 2019, Larry Yocom and I bought a small 16th century castle in the south of France, in the town of Parisot, 82160 in the Tarn & Garonne department of France.
Then, in 2022, we bought the 16th-17th century cloister for the Madeleine church in Albi, 81000 in the Tarn department.
Basically, we are straight south from Paris. About 7-8 hours driving. Or 4 hours by TGV train through Bordeaux to Toulouse..which is then about an hour from Albi by car or train.
This page will tell you something about both properties.
Castle
As castles go, it's a smallish, medieval stone fortress, built in 1501 for one of the minor Knights of Rhodes. It's called Le Château de l'Astorguié. The address is 39 Rue de la Mairie, Parisot 82160 France. The satellite view will show you the surrounding area most easily. It's a fascinating historic site in a rural setting. The town of almost 900 people has 2 bakers, 2 restaurants, a butcher, bar, pharmacy, post office, primary school, medical office, chocolatier, beauty parlor...and a big church right across the street from us. We are perched on a steep hillside, along an ancient road encircling the village.
The process
Starting right after Trump's election, fearing the worst, we began to look online at real estate sites in France. We were amazed what great value American dollars can buy in places like France, Spain or Italy. We viewed 160 properties online, made a comprehensive spreadsheet listing each property's qualities, focusing it as we researched. In May of 2019, we viewed ten homes and three châteaux on our shortlist. Mostly we were looking in the Tarn et Garonne, Loire, and Dordogne areas.
The place we bought is shown in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4iuoAJSbds. The music is a little ponderous but the photography is good. The video shows the castle's medieval architecture, outbuildings, stone terrace, hay fields, and the town quite nicely
The British couple who sold this to us finished its remodel to a very high degree of perfection, preserving its historic look while updating all the systems. They bought it in 2000, and spent two years dealing with the complications of permits, plans, architects, etc. (The French do love their bureaucracy which makes remodeling a historical property like this a nightmare.) Then in 2003 they started rebuilding the place, keeping it in scaffolding into 2005. They moved in during 2005, and lived there until 2019, when their children and grandchildren had dispersed around the world.
Le Château de l'Astorguié
It's a six-story building with a lovely circular staircase to all the various levels in one of its towers. It's not wheelchair accessible so we have to use it while we're still healthy!
Each floor has two main rooms. The large rooms (salon, kitchen, major bedrooms) are all 20 x 24 feet. The smaller rooms (dining room, office, and guest bedrooms) are all 20 x 15 feet. The second tower contains the bathrooms for each of the adjacent major rooms. In fact, each of the five bedrooms in the castle has an attached “ensuite” bathroom. On the back corners of the building are even two echaugettes, or sentinel turrets.
There are two vaulted "cave" rooms on the lowest floor that open out to the expansive, south facing, stone terrace which is also reachable from a grand stone staircase outside the kitchen. Off the terrace is a swimming pool, a greenhouse, and extensive gardens, including a kitchen garden that will bring us much pleasure.
Larry has been paving the way for us by meeting many fine people, mostly British expats, since he doesn't speak French yet. He and I are being tutored in French twice weekly. Immersion is the key, we hear. And we are not yet brave enough to go full French.
For pleasure, I plan to improve my gardening skills, learn more about fruit tree cultivation, and investigate beekeeping. Larry is already building on his baking skills. He's also been doing a great job managing the castle and holding down the fort. We plan to cook and entertain our visiting friends whenever they come.
Our home will be a great place from which to explore Europe through its nearest airport, Toulouse. We are all eager to see more of the world. We have high hopes for how all of this goes for each of us.
We returned to France to sign and close on the castle in December, 2019 after a 6-month purchase process full of tedious French bureaucracy. Larry moved to France permanently on that trip and I returned to Seattle expecting that I would visit Larry a few times during 2020 and then move in 2021. Due to COVID, I was not able to visit and was only able to move here as of November, 2021. I am loving my semi-retirement.
Cloister
We bought our wonderful home in Albi in the spring of 2022. It's an old 16th-17th century cloister building, next to the city’s Madeleine church, built of brick and stone. It’s a bit rustic looking from the exterior but the interior spaces were remodeled in the early 2000s by a very tasteful architect to become a wonderful set of residential spaces. Our home has about 6,000 square feet of interior space with a central yard that's 60 x 60 feet surrounded by an 8 foot wide, brick arched, walkway on all 4 sides. The arcade walkways are 75 feet long. The monks who lived here for centuries walked around the yard every day in those arched hallways. It's spectacular, and nothing like where we lived in Seattle.
The castle has 7 acres of garden/land to keep up while the cloister has only the central yard, and then a bit of a backyard where the parking is. I made some raised beds in back for our vegetable garden, and work on it every day just like the monks who used to live here did.
We own all 4 sides of the cloistered garden and have total privacy. No one but us can see it or use it.
The two garages, and a studio space above outfitted as a gym, are on the north side of the yard. The west side is just a long hallway on the second floor, above the arcade walkway, and it borders the church.
The east side has the large living room, salon space above the kitchen/dining area. The kitchen is a fabulous Boffi kitchen, all stainless steel with Gaggenau appliances. The floor and the cooking area wall are a lovely grey limestone, which continues outside as the walkway all the way around the yard. That limestone surface also goes vertically upstairs to form the fireplace wall in the salon.
The south side contains the 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. Our two guest bedrooms are very nicely appointed for art loving friends and family visitors.
The upper floor gallery also contains three long interior hallways, along the south, west, and east sides that repeat the footprint of the open-air arcade below them. Each hallway is about 75 feet long and 8 feet wide, encircling the courtyard with windows that look down into it. These hallways provide a luxurious amount of gallery-like, wall space.
The windows from the bedrooms also look down on the yard, and there is a fourth long hallway that connects the bedrooms and bathrooms.
Aside from remodeling the bedrooms and bathrooms, we have added a lot of track lighting, several Venetian chandeliers, and reworked the yard and gardens. We added a small swimming pool in the middle of the yard with a wooden, rolling pool cover over it, which becomes a stage for performances in the summer. There is also a stone terrace surrounding the pool, some wooden decking, and some stone pathways that we built ourselves.
Albi is a great city of almost 55,000 people, about the size of Olympia, WA. But with 100 French restaurants. We live in the part of town that was always the residential area for the working class. We are about 10 minutes walking to the old town center and its giant cathedral....the largest brick church building in the world. Next door is the very grand Archbishop’s palace which now hosts the wonderful Toulouse-Lautrec Museum.
There is a public market open daily. There are farmers markets, and a big flea market on Saturdays. A lot of music gets performed here in the grand theaters, churches and is even hosted by us in our own cloister.
The chateau is 90 minutes from the airport in Toulouse, and Albi is only an hour to Toulouse Airport. We can also take a train from Albi to Toulouse.
