Foreign property envy

Rosie Millard is tempted by a holiday fling with some hot property

Every year when I go abroad on holiday, I fall victim to a strange malaise. I call it foreign property envy, or FPE, although John Keats, the Romantic poet and dreamer extraordinaire, had a posher phrase for it: negative capability. It’s the ability to think yourself into the spirit of (in my case) a French villa or (in Keats’s case) a nightingale. You start to believe you actually inhabit said villa, or, er, bird.

Avian fantasies aside, what about property? Falling in love with a French maison, a Spanish beachside home or the turreted castle in Umbria you have hired for two weeks in August can get serious. Quickly. If not nipped in the bud, it can lead to protracted visits to the local estate agent, lengthy chats with one’s bank manager and tortuous negotiations in an unfamiliar tongue with lawyers and vendors. After which, you might end up with the object of your lust - and have to learn to live with the consequences.

Last week, I suffered a bad dose of FPE, my first of the season, while on a cruise down the Norwegian fjords. In June, the fjords are lovely, all green water, lush mountains, cascading waterfalls and sunshine. The waterside dwellings are equally charming: isolated, painted wooden houses with steep roofs. We slid slowly past, with Grieg playing hauntingly from our cabin. It was spectacular. Cheesy, but spectacular. “Wouldn’t it be great to own one of these,” said Mr Millard lovingly. I know, I know - the love life of two property anoraks: it’s pathetic.

Wherever we are in the world, our obsession catches up with us. It’s like travelling with an incurable condition - athlete’s foot, or some such. Given a lull of more than four minutes, Mr Millard will wander over to look at estate agents’ windows or neighbouring houses or, worse still, start our favourite game: guess the value. He (and I) can now do this with such accuracy, we are thinking of suggesting it as a quiz show on some cable channel.

But back to the boat. Together, we painted a glowing picture of how we would enjoy our new Norwegian getaway, maybe near Bergen (Grieg’s home town, coincidentally), or in the tiny village of Flam, on a tributary of the country’s longest fjord. When the cruise ships arrive, Flam’s population of 400 increases by 1,000%. But come winter, the visitors all leave - and there’s the rub. Let’s forget about June and factor in the Norwegian winter, when it gets light at 10.30am and dark again at 2pm.

“What do you do in the winter?” I asked, on a guided tour to Grieg’s house. “We tend to sleep a lot,” replied the guide. That’s when they aren’t drying out – there is a reason Norway looks so green, and that’s because it rains most of the time. Bergen is the wettest city in Europe. Suddenly, our Nordic idyll looked a bit less idyllic. Invited for tea in a small two-up, two-down townhouse with a garden in the fjordside town of Stavanger, Mr Millard and I started to play our game. “Half a million quid,” he suggested, and was duly gratified when the hostess congratulated him on his accuracy.

“I had an obsession with buying a house in Norway, too,” says my friend, the television reporter Donal MacIntyre. He also fell in love with one in an Inuit settlement in Greenland, 700 miles within the Arctic Circle, where it never gets light at all in winter. Instead, he made what appeared a dream purchase in southwest France: a semi-derelict manor house for £210,000 that came with a dovecote, gîte, barn, orchard, river bank and the biggest private pool in the country. “I bought it entirely by accident,” he says. When the sun was shining.

What MacIntyre ended up with was not a holiday paradise, but a list of calamities. No kitchen, no bathroom, no air-con. Then there were the deer, the termites, thieves and the necessity for an on-site security manager. MacIntyre has spent loads on making it liveable, but never really used it himself. “I’m selling it as we speak,” he says. He’s finally got it off his hands for about £350,000. His tip? “If you fall in love with a holiday home, buy one off a couple who spent all their money doing it up, and are now bankrupt and have to sell.” Helena Frith Powell, French expert of these pages, who lives in the Languedoc, has some simple advice. “Try to remember that, however gorgeous a house looks after four bottles of rosé on a sunny afternoon, the winters in France can be horrible,” she says. “Unless you’re a millionaire, you will need to earn money. Some people end up commuting back to the UK, others end up broke and with no way of getting back into the UK housing market.”

So we have committed to keeping our eyes firmly down during the entirety of the summer. No visits to foreign estate agencies, no fjordside bolt hole, no pipe dreams of life in a Tuscan castle. The children will be overjoyed. Whether we can keep up this spartan experiment remains to be seen.

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/investment/article4219935.ece