Monday
Architect’s diary It’s all in a week’s work for France-based Neil Vesma
belief in my own immortality, and the back pain, mostly kept at bay by some spectacularly strong painkillers. Now, where was I?
The Pergola of Doom
MONDAY The pain is excruciating as they strap me to the stretcher and put on the neck brace. Later I will throw up as the ambulance reaches the hospital. These are the least cheerful
memories from Saturday as I was helping Charlotte, my glamorous practice manager, build a pergola in her garden. I’d been pleased with my design, with the beams radiating out from the corner of the garden wall, modest but elegant. “Just like me!” she’d quipped,
but then my foot slipped off the third rung of the ladder and I fell like a sack of spuds fl at on my back, cracking what I now know is my occiput (back of my head) on the ground. So now it’s Monday, I’m out
of A&E with mild concussion and nothing broken except my
Tue day
TUESDAY Jean-Jacques, the mayor, rings up to ask my opinion on a permis de construire application which has come in for a new solar-roofed barn just outside town. I’m pleased he’s taking full advantage of my recent election to the conseil municipal, otherwise what’s the point? In any event I’m having a little trouble focusing on the laptop today so I walk up to the mairie in the market square to see how I can help. The plans show it’s to be a
huge building, half the size of a football fi eld, set on a tree-lined ridge close to the tiny stone chapel of Parisot. I know the place well, as the steep little lane that climbs to it has me gasping for air each time I ride my bike up it. Jean-Jacques wants my opinion before he gives his report to the planning offi ce, as he has to balance the long-term advantage of clean
Wedne day
An upside-down design with the bedrooms dug into the hillside
energy generation against its very immediate visual impact on the countryside. I ring Charlotte and ask if she’d mind driving me up there. The chapel is visible from
some distance, sited at the very end of the ridge, a couple of kilometres out of town. Its only neighbours are an old stone farmhouse and barn, and the walled graveyard. The new solar barn is to be just the other side of the lane from the
chapel, albeit hidden by a line of trees. But when the leaves fall, or the trees eventually die? I can see the applicant is concerned at the sheer scale of the thing, as he is required to submit a photomontage of the building in situ, and has seriously understated its bulk in the picture. It’s clear to me the proposal
will destroy the sense of timeless isolation of the chapel and its surroundings, and when we get back I email Jean- Jacques to say if he wants to support the scheme, he should do so on condition that the barn gets moved well away from the chapel and a scheme of tree planting be carried out to minimise its visual impact over the decades ahead. I’m glad it’s him and not me that has to take the fi nal decision.
Will the large solar-roofed barn conversion spoil the timeless isolation of the ancient chapel close by? 72 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS:November/December 2023
WEDNESDAY Charlotte seems happy to drive me about this week. It gives her a chance to show off her dark green Mini convertible (of which she is rightly very proud) and to bend my ear with her penchant for naming things. “Do you think I should call it the Pergola of Doom or Neil’s Nemesis?” she enquires breezily as she drives over another pothole, sending white-hot javelins of
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