20 years in France

This weekend (15th May) marks a very special anniversary for Chris and I. Twenty years ago we filled a 7ton truck with all our posessions and hopped on the Portsmouth to St Malo ferry to live in France .

We'd been planning for about a year. The previous June we were staying here on holiday in my parents holiday home, we'd been coming for a few years. Chris first came down in 1988 with my brother to help my Dad finish renovating his first French cottage (and have a boys holiday drinking wine and soaking up the sun) - a curies cottage opposite the 12th century church in the village of Fontaine Chalendray about 20 mins drive from here. (Chris and I have been together quite a while, we met in 1983 when I was just 16)

My parents had bought the property here in France, in 1985. My father was a workaholic and loved to build . He had taken early retirement and needed something to fill his time (he wasn't a builder he had been chief accountant for the post office but built houses in his spare time; at that point he'd already self built at least 8 houses in the Uk - on weekends and evenings !)

A friend had told him that property in France was cheap and there wern't the same restrictions on self building as in Spain where they had a villa and you had to use Spanish builders rather than doing it yourself . This area seemed a logical place - it was cheap as few people in those days had heard of the Charente Maritime. Most Brits bought in Brittany or wizzed through on the motorway down to the Dordogne. It was also where he often stopped on his long drive from Cheshire to the Costa Blanca.

 My parents bought the cottage and attached stone barn for £4000 ! The cottage was basically habitable with a fosse, toilet and cold water tap, my father just made it really habitable with hot and cold running water, a fitted kitchen and a modern bathroom. He was looking forward to spending time here, slowly renovating the barn next door and enjoying the way of life, however that didn't happen....

They offered my father £25,000 for just the cottage (they didn't want the barn) - it didn't take many of his accountancy skills to work out he should sell, and his desire to be busy meant he should buy another property to do up.

To cut quite a long story a little shorter he bought, renovated and sold another 3 stone barns over the next few years until he eventually bought the barns here in Courgeon - La Grange du Moulin was born !

We soon realised that catering to young families was a great market. Pre schoolers come in June and September - a time when we were often very quiet if not empty. With the arrival of the cheap airline routes being opened up, more young families were travelling further afield as it was easier than a long car journey which was the only real option before. We started offering more equipment - not just a cot and a high chair but a steriliser, potty, booster seats, plastic crockery etc. It was all very much appreciated and families started coming year after year because they said there was no where else like it and it was so easy for them, it made their holiday so much more relaxing.

We started focussing our publicity in areas where young families would be looking. In the early days we only advertised in Chez Nous, a glossy brochure and it worked for us, but then the company was taken over and it became less and less effective in advertising to our core market. We started looking at other companies but no one at the time really offered what we were after so we started our own web site

Initially all reservations were done by phone, few people had email. We had a paper brochure we would send out to interested families. They would post back a booking form and a cheque and we would post back confirmation of their booking. These days everythings online from completing the booking form to making the payment and we rarely actually 'speak' to any of our families before they arrive, saying that with the ease of email we tend to have much more communication.

I had great fun developing the web site learning how to add photos and change the colours. Now I need to know about html, seo and google analytics to stay even close to the top of our game. Most of our reservations now come not through advertising but through google searches for our key search terms like 'child friendly' . It's constantly developing and changing with the focus now being on independent reviews like on trip advisor and Mumsnet being a top priority to internet savvy families. I'm certainly no expert and no doubt could pay someone to do these things far better for me , but I enjoy doing it (and havn't been self employed for 20 years to start paying other people to do my job for me) I try to stay reasonably up to date and have a strong Google presence (just search Wendy Blakeman) and try to stay active on facebook and twitter.