Saturday, 15 March 2025

Back to Burgundy

 

Burgundian countryside

Kate, it is hard to believe that it has been nearly two years since we last chatted about your French journey. At that time, you and your husband, Nathan, were navigating visa constraints and travelling back and forth between your homes in Australia and France. However, following you on Instagram, I know that there has been an exciting development in your French lives of late. Tell us more.

Thank you so much for reaching out to me and again being interested in our life here in France.

Things have definitely changed for us over the past two years. We made the decision to sell everything in Australia……our French restaurant, our house, our car and we packed everything up into two pallets worth of belongings and shipped them all to France.

Just reading this back it sounds quite crazy and a lot of people probably think that we are, but we followed our dream of living in France permanently, and without any children or family ties in Australia it was not a huge decision to make and we just did it!! We of course miss friends in Australia but so many have come to visit us and it’s just wonderful to have time here with them and to show everyone our day-to-day life, why we chose to be here and what we love about France. Its great to have one to three weeks with people to slow down and chat and catch up whereas when they lived around the corner we would just have quick get-togethers but we really have had quality time with friends here, and we know we will in the future when more of our beautiful friends around the world visit us.

It was really exciting for us when our shipment from Australia arrived. It was like Christmas and we got to unpack some really special pieces of artwork, books, photos and things that meant a lot to us to merge our two lives together and cement our life here.

In saying all that, cementing our life here has been a little bit challenging (to put it ever so mildly) with the French bureaucracy. The French are definitely known for excessive red tape and we have experienced these challenges and frustrations firsthand.

Kate and Nathan in front of their new home in Burgundy

Visas … I suspect that this might not be your favourite word. Where are you up to with this process?

We arrived on a tourist Visa which gave us one year to be here without working. During this year, we drew up our business plan to open a small cooking school in our home and to conduct small bespoke food and wine and cooking tours around the Burgundy region. We filled out all the relevant financial and health documents and since then we have been waiting for over a year for our right to work and then we had to fight to extend our visa for three months and now that is just about to expire. We’ve extended it for another three months, all this without hearing any updates or progress reports on our carte de séjour which means we would have the right to work and have healthcare etc in France.

But in saying all this, we would still encourage people to follow their dream to move to France if that’s what they would like to do, but to enter into it with an endless amount of patience and infinite financial resources in case they also have to wait a long period for a positive outcome to their Visa application.

Summer lunch with friends
Even without the right to work at the moment and the uncertainty of our permanent future here we feel as if we still have to strive forward with the process and be patient and be positive. So with that in mind, we have made yet another somewhat gutsy move you could say, and bought a bigger home in a wine village to create our cooking school with accommodation. We sold our beautiful little cottage here in the countryside of Burgundy and will be moving closer to Beaune which we believe is the wine and culinary centre of Burgundy.

It was a really big decision to sell our picturesque little stone country cottage in the Morvan national park. It was a fantastic holiday house surrounded by beautiful countryside, but it was a little more challenging to live there year-round. We also feel that for our clients, we can provide a better tour experience closer to markets and wineries and we will renovate this new house specifically to offer cooking classes, wine tastings, a small on-site brocante and accommodation.

You had some wonderful advice and practical tips in our last interview for anyone who was dreaming of buying their own place in France, did it make this second purchase easier?

Renovating decisions
We enter this new (and huge) renovation more confidently than when we tackled our first home, La Petite Maison, as over the past two years we have developed friendships and relationships and now have access to quality trades people. Renovating in France is incredibly challenging as I’m sure it as it is in many parts of the world and we have found it terribly hard with our limited French to talk about technical parts of the renovation with electricity and plumbing and that sort of thing. It was extremely hard to even get trades people to come and give us a quote for work and then there are the horror stories of people telling us that we would be charged tourist rates instead of local rates so we were only sceptical with some of some of the quotes that we received. But luckily now we have reliable and exceptional trades people that we get to work with on this new project. My advice to anyone buying a property here and renovating it is to get the advice of neighbours or local people and try and get referrals from them. A lot of tradespeople also will not travel far for work so will only work within a village and a very small radius around that village, so it really is best to talk to the locals about who they trust and recommend.

Having lived full time in France, organised renovations, and participated in village and social activities, your language must have had a work out. How is your French now?

Teddy
Our French has definitely improved over the past two years mainly out of necessity but also out of a desire for us to be able to communicate with our friends and now we are comfortable in nearly all situations and social environments. People may have seen on Instagram that we bought a puppy about six months ago and locals are very amused when they realise that Teddy is bilingual. All his commands he understands in both French and English so if he has one of our French friends looking after him, he can understand them and then also us when we forget to use French. 😆

To finally wrap this up I would say that we are very happy with our life here and with our decision to move here permanently. We’ve had some stressful times lately with the prefecture and our Visa status and how slowly that is moving along, but we couldn’t wish for more beautiful friendships and relationships  and we continue to embrace French culture, its food, wine and lifestyle and we absolutely love hosting our friends from all around the world and sharing with them all that makes France so special and so enviable for many. We truly feel lucky to have had the opportunity to make this move and to create a new chapter in our lives…

Wow, from one leap of faith to another. At the moment, you are burning both end of the candle having moved full steam ahead with your renovation. Your project looks both exciting and exhausting ... and fun to watch from the sidelines and see the wonderful progress that you're making. 


I look forward to staying in touch and wish you both the very best with your new ventures. 

 

If you would like to follow her journey (highly recommended), Kate can be found on Instagram @la_grande_maison_burgundy/


Nathan and Teddy at home in France

And for another French-Australian story (mine 😊), please find below links to my 5 books (including Books 1-3 in my 'French at Heart' series). With thanks.


The links should take you to where you need to go, wherever you are in the world, to make a purchase.





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