Who are we?

We are Philip and Rachel. We met in London in 1997 and in a whirlwind of a romance we were married within a year and have never looked back since. We are a team, we do everything together and with our two wonderful children, Freddie and Frankie, our two dogs, Lola and Simba, we cannot wait to write the next chapter in the story of our life.

How did we get here?

For 10 years we had a comfortable life in London. Lots of friends and a great social life. Always catching up with different people. We were pretty carefree. We had lovely holidays. We enjoyed discovering different parts of the UK as we recognised how blessed we were with such a lovely and varied country to explore, but we also liked to go to travel abroad. We discovered some gems along the way and stayed in some of the finest boutique hotels. We also had friends in Nice and every year we took our pilgrimage down to the South of France to spend time with friends and enjoy the delights of the Côte D’Azur. One year we decided to drive from the UK through France from North to South. Our destination was Nice, but we took a week to get there. We would drive during the day and at about 3pm we would look in the Relais et Chateaux guide book out and find a Chambre d’Hôte somewhere off the beaten track to stay over night. We loved this freedom and we found some really interesting places along the way. It was somewhere on this trip, staying in a beautiful old stone house and sharing a home cooked meal with an eclectic group of travellers that we realised this was what we wanted to do. To live in France, to enjoy working with nature and to be a family together and happy.

What can you expect of us?

An adventure! An adventure into living and working in France. An adventure in creating wonderful food for you to try. An adventure into organic farming. An adventure into making crafty beauties for your home. An adventure into creating amazing artisan soap and candles and creams. An adventure in making a home out of a shell.

I sincerely hope that we are able to laugh our way through this because we have a hell of a lot to learn and to do - and to be perfectly frank, we have spent every penny getting to this point, so we have to manage our processes very carefully!! We will have to work out how we can make ends meet month by month, but along the way I want to have fun, make friends, be happy, and count our blessings daily. That is the whole reason we are doing this…..Simple, right??

Along the way we will share our journey with whoever is interested! We will share everything we learn. This will include some great recipes for food and stunning beauties of home products, soap making, veg plot planning and animal husbandry along with all of our challenges, mistakes and successes in farming and building. Our mission is to be as self sustainable as possible. Everything is a resource and we want to ensure the planet we hand over to our grandchildren is thriving.

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