On a cold December dawn in the depths of Covid lockdown, I made my great escape to France. With no international removals available (because, Covid), I put my life into storage and filled the car with flutes, music, clothes, a coffee machine, and a Clavinova piano, and headed south to a new life.
The perfect storm of Covid and Brexit had finally tipped the balance. I’d dreamt of living my flute life French-style for years but the unforeseen circumstances of those dark days had created a now-or-never scenario. The moment had come to pull the idea out of the “too hard” basket and seize the day.
The plan had started to emerge a few months earlier, that first Covid summer when a bit of restricted travel became possible again. As I meandered around southwest France, I came across a maison de maître in a village on the banks of a tranquil river. The moment I saw it I was smitten. I wanted that house. To live there, to say bonjour to the boulanger every morning, to make music behind its tall, elegant windows. The pieces of life’s puzzle moved and rearranged themselves, and in that instant the seeds of change were sown.
By the skin of our teeth
We got the keys on the 28th of December 2020, squeezing under the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement deadline with just three days to spare. It was… stressful.
For the first six months we focused on building works, setting up an ad hoc studio in the dining room where I ran my Zoom courses (still going strong) and worked on our publications. Stage 1 of the project was to convert the top floor of the house, an empty roof space (the grenier) which hadn’t been touched in nearly 200 years. This would become our music studio, library, and study, along with a small bathroom and second kitchen - after all, three floors is a long way to go for a cup of coffee.
My French expanded with unlikely vocabulary as I took on the management of the project design, procurement, and trades. New words for 'plasterboard', 'circuit breaker', 'scaffolding' and 'architrave' were soon second nature and I mastered phrases never encountered in my school French text books. Things like: "I need a quote for sandblasting the beams" or "two double sockets on that wall” and “get that ladder back here NOW” (an opportunity to practise some of my more colourful vocab, because without a staircase that ladder was the only way down. And I was up).




At over 1200 sq feet, the studio is about the same size as an average three-bed house in the UK, and the small matter of taking it from belle epoque wreck to final vision involved a bit more than tweaking the decorative touches. First we had to manage the bones of the project, and I got to grips with the (less than exciting) essentials of wiring, plumbing, insulation, and plastering - not to mention French building regulations and all the responsibilities that come with restoring a monument classé (a listed historic building).
In French.
It was all-consuming, dusty, stressful, and not without its minor disasters (stories for another day). It was also creative work, and very satisfying to see the results as they unfolded. And of course, as with all hard-but-worth-it things, the pain and effort faded from mind as the hidden potential of the neglected grenier gradually began to emerge.
The cherry on the cake arrived when the full-size grand piano, which had made its own pre-Brexit exit to specialist storage in the Netherlands, was lifted into its new home by crane. The whole village turned out to watch this nail-biting moment and we even made it into Le Sud-Ouest newspaper.
Orchestral movers Griffioen Transport BV lifted the piano into place through the top floor window by remote control.
And finally, in May 2022, the vision was complete. John and I welcomed our first Flutes in France participants (follow the links to read a bit about this year’s course and enjoy a few photos).
All our 2024 courses are fully booked, but you can put your name on the pre-application list for 2025 here.
BONUS! Download your French flute dream: Fauré’s beautiful song Après un rêve arranged for flute and piano, plus accompaniment backing track recorded by John Alley. This arrangement comes from Fauré: Après un Rêve 12 Melodies for Flute and Piano arranged by Elisabeth Parry and John Alley, published by Aurea Capra Editions.
Download your PDF here:
And accompaniment backing track recorded by John Alley here:
Your studio is beautiful!
What a beautiful space it is now and how lovely it is to have you and John here in our French lives!