Machine for living

Squirrel like, you’ve horded stuff for years, and what used to be a comfortably commodious home in the French countryside is now reduced to a warren of corridors between piles of little used furniture, books and heirlooms (ie. largely useless bric a brac your mum foisted on you and will check you’ve still got when she comes on her annual trip). Selfishly, your children have grown too and now need proper beds and somewhere they can leave toys, unwashed clothes, discarded school books and unidentifiable detritus that you’d only handle while wearing industrial strength marigolds.

In short, you’ve got three choices. First, ditch the kids and wife and de camp with the one dog who listens to you to a cosy flat in town. Second, move, and finally, build an extension. Given that you’re unlikely to find anyone else who’ll put up with your moods and incipient OCD - and that the prospect of selling up and sorting through 10 years worth of accumulated junk fills you with horror, the last option seems best. Having overdosed on endless repeats of Grand Designs, you then get all arty and sketch out some plans, the original (and simple) idea of creating a funky box getting more complicated with every new draft.

Desperately pleased with the eventual Le Corbusier -esque feel of the thing (which deliberately doesn’t remotely match the existing cottage), a local architect pal translates it into blueprints and sends the dossier to the departmental planning authority – who hate it. Mired as they are in the past (picture an office crammed with sepia prints of Ox pulled hay wains, grubby children with rickets - and replete with zero appreciation of anything built since the invention of indoor plumbing) it’s a hard sell. Happily, Monsieur l’architect is the only one in the area who’s allowed to play with listed buildings, and brings the full weight of his credentials to bear. And given that his insistence is beginning to interrupt the department head’s lunchtimes - and the guy who does the site visits thinks any return trip will result in him becoming the dog’s next meal - the plans are at last approved and returned.

All that left now is to build le box – and to keep your sanity and bank account intact in the process. Maybe that flat in town wasn’t such a bad idea after all.