Beauty Underfoot

There are many houses in this region of France that are hundreds of years old. They're very similar to one another--walls constructed out of red brick and river rock plastered together with mud. There are tile roofs and windows with painted wooded shutters. Floors are often simple clay tiles, but sometimes things get wild.

When one rehabs one of these old houses, it's often standard procedure to pick out the centuries-old mud and recoat the wall with stucco leaving the old rock and brick still slightly exposed. It must be a lot of work, but it probably lasts a few hundred years and you never need to paint the walls--though the windows and doors and the woodwork are usually painted.

One of my favorite interior paint combinations is red and yellow.

Old rough-hewn wooden beams are usually left exposed.

People often add extra windows when they re-do an old house because the original version tends to be dark. I'm picturing a perfect French house with wild floors and lots of extra windows. And a pigeonier.

It would be in a beautiful village---remote, yet with a train station and a TGV to Paris. Alas, ce n'existe pas.