A Pied à Terre in Paris: Living in France

Tired of feeling like a tourist when she came to Paris for work, Rosemary Auchmuty decided to buy a pied-à-terre, which she could also rent out -she’s so glad she took the plunge…

Ours is not the Paris of the popular imagination, with wide boulevards and gracious high-ceilinged apartments, like those in Emily in Paris. Nor is it the Paris of 18th-century hotels particuliers with their wide carriage entrances and spacious courtyards. Our Paris is older even than those. Our street dates from the 12th century and our building from the 17th. The street is cobbled and our house has a narrow entry and an uneven, circular oak staircase up to our flat.
It is in the third arrondissement – the Haut Marais, as it is known. These days it is inching towards gentrification but when we bought our flat, 20 years ago, this was an area populated by Chinese and North African immigrants and their restaurants and wholesale leather businesses. Coming from London, we loved it.

The main reason we bought in this area was that it was central but affordable. We didn’t have the money to buy in the fashionable fifth, sixth or seventh arrondissements in the Left Bank, nor in the ‘real’ Marais in the fourth, which was already trendy. We wanted a place where I could stay when I was teaching in Paris, as I did from time to time, because I was tired of staying in hotels and eating out all the time. I had walked all over the city looking in estate agents’ windows to find the best location.

We did our viewing in the old-fashioned way: we went into agencies and explained what we wanted. It was Mme Walter of Immobilier Beaubourg, which is no longer there, who showed us the flat we eventually bought. It was one of the first we saw, and we dismissed it immediately as being too dark, too cramped and needing too much work.

We put in an offer for a smaller place down the street, that needed no work, but when we came back to clinch the deal it had gone to someone else.
Continuing our search, we looked at other properties. One thing that is striking about Paris apartments at the cheaper end of the market is that they can be very small -properties of 15, even 10 square metres, go on sale and, when slightly bigger, they can be arranged very oddly because of the way they are carved out of grander buildings. In one apartment we viewed, the toilet was by the entrance and you had to walk through the shower room to reach the bedroom. In others, the kitchen windows overlooking the central courtyard had a view straight into your neighbour’s kitchen, or even bedroom. Beds might be accommodated in curtained-off alcoves or on mezzanines. Most of these flats were up several flights of stairs as our price category did not run to lifts. We were younger then and this didn’t bother us..

Mme Walter took us back to the apartment we had looked at before. Even then we didn’t appreciate its qualities until she said (in French, of course): “You could paint the walls white and it would look much brighter.” She added, of the kitchen at the back: “You could turn this into a bedroom.” The owner had his bed in the front room, treating it as a studio flat – it was packed with heavy, dark furniture. “You could put in a cuisine Américaine in the salon,” Mme Walter pursued.

Without all that furniture, there would be plenty of room. We wanted a separate bedroom as we have different body clocks one of us goes to bed, and gets up, hours before the other. And if we had a sofa-bed in the front room, we could have guests to stay. Another thing going for this flat was that it was arranged very conventionally. The front door opened into a corridor with two doors off to the right the first to what became our bedroom and the other to the bathroom. The big room now contains the kitchen, dining, sitting and desk areas. The bedroom, overlooking the courtyard, is quiet. The front room has two shuttered windows overlooking the street.

So we bought the flat. The seller, one of a group of people from Wenzhou in China who came to Paris in the 1950s, had lived in it for 50 years, initially in the front room only (the toilet was then on the turn of the stairs), with his Polish wife, her son and their three daughters. Now alone, he was selling up because he was going into a care home.

Under French inheritance law, the surviving children (and grandchildren in one case) had to give approval for the sale. The seller was represented by one of the daughters at the acte de vente signing. Our notaire spoke English so could explain everything to us. She was based in the eighth arrondissement and, charming and efficient as she was, she was clearly not used to dealing with the cowboys of the casual third, who had forgotten to tell us to insure the property, which had to be done at the last moment.

Having bought the flat, we were acutely aware that it would need a lot of renovation and we had no idea how to go about this. That problem was solved (although others were created) on a later visit when I went into the Algerian café downstairs and asked the patron whether he knew anyone who could do building work. Everyone at the bar pointed to one man who was there drinking with the others.

Madjid mustered a team of friends – Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan – to create the apartment we wanted. As anyone who has undertaken renovations in France will know, we had a lot to learn about building practices. His devis (estimate) seemed huge and vague, and although it was technically binding, that
didn’t mean there weren’t additional payments for things along the way – and occasional loans out of sheer amitié, some of which we wrote off. But in return we acquired a friend and handyman always available at the drop of a phone call (these days, a WhatsApp) to come to our rescue or the rescue of our guests when we were not there. Madjid was – still is – the best French teacher I have known: as a non-native, he speaks very clear, simple French, and when I still fail to understand, he has the gift of re-phrasing what he said in a way that I do.

There have been desperate moments with this flat: twice we have been flooded from the flat above, and once guests returning late from a dance were unable to get in and we had to phone from the US, to book them into a hotel for the night and arrange for Madjid to come round and fix the lock.

Keys (and the TV) have been stolen, toilets and drains blocked, machines have broken down. Practically everything has been upgraded and replaced and the flooded rooms repainted, recarpeted and refurnished. French insurance is great: it is simply based on your postcode and the number of rooms and they don’t increase your premium when you claim. But the moments of utter bliss have far outweighed the anxious times. The flat is so comfortable. With two-foot-wide walls, it is cool in summer and warm in winter. We have all the things we need there: excellent wifi, good shops and restaurants a few steps away. We can walk to almost everywhere (the Pompidou Centre and even Notre-Dame can be reached in minutes) and we have access to excellent public transport to take us further afield, for example to the Bois de Boulogne or the Bois de Vincennes, to Versailles, Chartres or Giverny. We have made many friends in the co-propriété and the quartier.

Paris is the most visited city in the world, but I often wonder why so few people think of buying property there, where they can have access to its charms all the time. Parts are expensive but so are areas of London: there are properties at all prices and the less touristy the area, the greater the possibility of getting a reasonably priced pied-à-terre and a more ‘French’ experience.

Parisians have a reputation for being rude to foreign visitors, but these days we find them uniformly kind and helpful. If they break into English when you are trying to speak French, don’t be offended: they love practising their English, which all schoolchildren learn and practically all public-facing employees now speak. Schools are good, and there are excellent services for people across the whole range of special needs. Plus access from the UK is so easy – we can reach our flat in Paris from our home in London in less than four hours.

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