MONDAY Feeling a tad jet-lagged following yesterday’s 17-hour trip back from visiting an old friend in Sardinia, via Milan, Paris and Bordeaux. Three great European cities in a day; I felt like an American tourist doing Europe. Among the highlights of the journey were the Sardinian taxi driver doing 112km/h in a 40km/h zone, and Leonardo’s Last Supper at Milan airport, rendered in chocolate in the duty-free zone. Sadly this was a) much smaller than the 8x4m original, and b) not actually for sale. Disappointing, as otherwise I would have bought it for Charlotte, my practice manager, as a freak example of contemporary Italian culture.


TUESDAY An email from the maire at Monsac, where my client’s application for a derelict mill conversion is risking refusal due to poor access and a lack of water for fi refi ghting in its vicinity. He writes that there’s an agricultural irrigation main crossing the


Wedne day


Architect’s diary It’s all in a week’s work for France-based Neil Vesma


site frontage and suggests I contact the following agencies to organise a solution: the Unité d’Aménagement Départemental, the services des eaux, the président du service des eaux, the Service Eau, Environnement et Risques and the Gestion des milieux aquatiques et prévention des inondations....


WEDNESDAY Usually I’m pretty good at battling my way through the thickets of French bureaucracy but this time I don’t know where to start, so I ring the maire and he suggests a site meeting with the Unité d’Aménagement and the services des eaux would be a good fi rst step, and gives me contact names and mobile numbers. I ring them and am


Wedne day


and coats for the obligatory handshakes bonjour. The mill is set away from the road across a pasture, and looks both charmingly bucolic and in dire need of rescue. I explain the issues and


The mill is in dire need of rescue


amazed that they’re both free today after lunch.


AFTER LUNCH Having parked on the verge precariously near the fossé, the ubiquitous roadside ditch, we assemble in our wellies, gloves


the water board man says we can’t tap into the irrigation main as it’s for irrigation not fi refi ghting, so we’ll need a bac souple instead. He’s talking about one of these plastic sacks like enormous dark green hot water bottles you occasionally see dotted about the countryside here. Ours will need to hold 30,000 litres and, he says, can’t be placed over the irrigation pipe. When I ask him where the pipe runs he says he can’t be sure as the services’ plans are somewhat approximate. He calls a colleague, who might be able


With its bucolic charms, it’s no wonder the owners fell for the mill, but it needs a lot of work 70 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS:March/April 2023


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