A little navel gazing

The leaves are falling off the trees, the potager is almost bare, and I can hardly believe that we've just been stashing away all the garden furniture, solar lights and all the rest for the winter. A couple of months ago we passed our 5 year milestone in this house, and in another couple it will be 6 years since we packed our bags into the boot of the car and came to live in France.

So here we are, already at the end of our first summer season welcoming guests. Inevitably as the days get shorter (sob) we go into reflective mood and start taking stock. What's it been like? What did we get right, and what did we get wrong? What have we discovered? What are we going to change or introduce for next year? Here I share with you just a few random ruminations for a cool autumn evening.

1.  When we first started to think about living in France we were initially unsure whether to set up a maison d'hôtes or to buy a small house for ourselves and have a couple of separate houses nearby to let to guests on a pure holiday rental basis. All I can say is that the two of us are soooo relieved we made the choice we did, because it's clear that we'd have got an awful lot less satisfaction from the rental route. We honestly think that people who choose to stay in a maison d'hôtes or bed and breakfast must be particularly lovely human beings, because pretty much without exception everyone has been a joy to share our home with.

2.  One of the things that we've got very right is the design of the house, which gives us as well as our two sets of guests complete privacy. So there's no question of bumping into someone you don't know very well (or even at all) when you emerge bleary eyed in the morning to make coffee, and no having to whisper to each other because there's another room right across the landing. Believe me, after 13 years of welcoming bed and breakfast guests in village houses, that's pure joy for me as well as for our guests!

3.  The great delight in doing what we do is meeting so many different people and being able to share in their lives, hear their stories, sit down with them over dinner or a glass of wine, find them a perfect walk for the day. We've had guests from all over the place - France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the UK, many of whom we've got to know through lots of exchanged emails even before they arrive. Often our guests have invited us for an apéro or, in one case, for 'afternoon tea' - and that's very touching because it makes us think that they must feel really at home.

4.  After several years of being chained to the kitchen while my guests sat down to dinner, finally I'm able to be out there sitting down and eating with them. That brings its own challenges, of course, like not getting carried away in a particularly juicy conversation while the next course quietly burns in the oven, but we seem to have largely mastered the art of cooking-serving-and-joining-in reasonably seamlessly now. I'm hugely grateful for those years in our restaurant kitchen though, or I have a feeling it would all feel much more difficult!

5.  While we're delighted that all but one set of this summer's guests have dined with us at least once (and frequently more often), we've noticed that fewer people than we expected have eaten out in restaurants more than once during their stay (and quite a few not at all). To be honest we have a few mixed feelings about that: while we'd obviously like to be doing our bit to support our local restaurants by sending them our guests, we know that it's a growing trend for people on holiday to pull in the reins in one area or another and we understand the need to do that. So what to do? Well, we're going to do two things - a kind of two-pronged attack, if you like. The first is to try and find the time to write a better restaurant guide to give a more enticing flavour of what's on offer out there; and the second is to create a summer kitchen in one of the barns so that for a lot of the year guests in La P'tite Maison, our chambre d'hôtes suite, will have the means to rustle up lunch or dinner even if the weather's not really good enough to get the barbecues out.

6.  We both feel incredibly lucky to be able to have the freedom to create in what we do, and to keep tweaking and growing to make our home and our lifestyle and what we offer even better (we hope!). That's really important for us - one of the things we both dread is getting stale and predictable, and we've seen too many people over the years lose their joy in welcoming guests by getting burned out.

7.  We work as hard as we ever did, but we have a lot more fun doing it!

One cuckoo doesn't make a - erm - spring (but then again it just might)

Last weekend, at St Girons market, we bought some of these:

and a great big bunch of this:

Then we made the first batch of this for your breakfasts this year:

and heard the first one of these:

and admired the new carpet in the garden:

and got up early to hear the dawn chorus

and had our first apéro outside

and got sunburned digging the potager (the thermometer was reading 39 degrees in the sun :-D).

Spring comes early here in the lush green foothills of our part of the Ariège. Wish you were here? Well, you could be, in 6 days, 5 hours and 13 minutes. (Actually you couldn't because we're reserved until the beginning of May. But May is wonderful too!).

Escape the Olympics in the French Pyrenees

This is one of those years when I'm very glad I don't live in the UK. First of all I'd have to put up with days of Jubilee hype and simpering sycophantic grovelling by the BBC's latest 'Royal correspondent' (shudder). And if as all that weren't enough, just a few weeks later there are the much-touted Olympics: more flag waving patriotic stuff .... and sport. Double shudder.

I know I'm being subtle here :-) but you may be picking up that I really can't be doing with all this nationalistic fervour. Maybe I have a gene missing but I just don't have any sort of patriotic sense of 'my country' or any of that stuff. It's bad enough having to carry a passport that makes me into a 'citizen of the United Kingdom' - why on earth (sic) can't I just be a citizen of the planet, full stop?

If you're as turned off by all this as I am, you might want to think about escaping for a few days. I can't do much about the Jubilee, I'm afraid - we've been full for that week within days of opening bookings and have been regularly turning people down since - but if you fancy escaping the Olympics in the French Pyrenees, we still have some space!

Here are just a few of the things you could be enjoying instead:

Poddling around on quiet roads.
Long peaceful walks in the mountains or foothills or valleys.
Picnics by cool streams up in the high summer pastures.
Some seriously good chamber music in a Romanesque cathedral at the St Lizier festival.
Swimming in the 28 degree water of the Lac de Mondély, then sipping a cold beer.
Watching marmots and chamois at Orlu.
Dancing with a partner who's wearing traditional costume and clogs at St Girons' huge folklore festival.
Eating a 'kebcam' under the stars, with jazz playing gently in the background, at Jean-Luc and José's duck buvette.
Dancing till the early hours to live African bands at Foix's 3 day African festival.
Watching vultures swoop over the crags while you eat lunch in the auberge overlooking the Etang d'Ayes.
Cooling off in some of the biggest prehistoric caves in Europe.
Spending a lazy afternoon in our garden listening to perfect, unbroken silence (home made cake or ice cream at tea time too!).
Chilling in the new spa at Ax les Thermes.
Enjoying a holistic massage or pulsing session in the garden at Maison Grillou, under the shade of one of our big trees.

Lying on a sun lounger at midnight with a glass of rosé, watching the Perseids meteor showers in Ariège's perfectly clear, dark, unpolluted skies.

We'd love to welcome others of like mind during the Olympic fortnight, so if you're tempted, go to Maison Grillou's Facebook page, 'like' it, book with us using the code you'll find there and we'll throw in a few extra treats for you when you arrive!

The fastest relooking in the west!

You know sometimes when you've finished designing a room and it looks great and then you spend some time in there and slowly it starts to dawn on you that although you might admire it, you don't love it? Or does that just happen to me?

The sitting room in our chambre d'hote suite La P'tite Maison was the last room I decorated and furnished - it was finally finished (well, I thought it was!) in late autumn last year. I'd wanted to lime wash it but couldn't because of the mish-mash of existing finishes - it had been two rooms until we knocked down the dividing wall - so I'd made a kind of non-lime wash following a recipe I found on a French website, in a striking terracotta colour that I concocted from various ochres and burnt sienna. When I did it, in mid summer, it looked really great. When I laid the oak floor it looked great. When I put the first bits of furniture in it looked good. When summer turned into autumn it looked fine. As winter approached it looked okay. Are you noticing something here?

Then I kind of moved in to the room for a couple of weeks to do some curtain making. It was mid winter, and although we were still having lots of sun, the colour of the light had changed and my terracotta colour had somehow lost its warmth. And something about the whole room felt wrong - too square, too hard, too - um - masculine. We spent a couple of days moving furniture round, trying out different bits of furniture, new rugs ... to no avail. It still looked okay, but it didn't feel okay.

And so I spent Christmas 'relooking' it, as we say here: new paint/wash on the walls, new curtains, an art wall with lots of my framed photos on it, lots more texture, and my favourite antique bentwood chair - a real (and rare) Thonet Number 4, dating back to 1885 or so, picked up in a sorry state at the auction house in Watton in Norfolk for a song . It's almost finished - just the door curtain to make and hang, when I can finally figure out where the lighting cable runs behind the plasterwork (and that is a long story!). Here it is. What do you think?

L'Atelier d'Artiste - upstairs

Upstairs there's a huge, triple aspect, cathedral ceilinged space for sitting and sleeping, plus a bathroom. This floor has the original ferme (triangular roof truss) plus huge sliding glass windows that have been made to measure to fit the original barn openings, which not only maintains the original 'sense' of the building but gives great views over the surrounding woodland and hillside, and allows a phenomenal amount of light into the space.

The sitting area has a sofa, a mini TV with French plus some English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Italian channels, and a combined hi-fi/DVD player/iPod dock.

The sleeping area has a king size (160cm by 200cm) bed and the usual storage for clothes and incidentals. All the walls have been rendered with fine hemp and lime; woodwork is reclaimed chestnut.

The bathroom was created from the former grenier (grain store) and has a tiled 180cm by 120cm (yes, you did read that right!) walk-in shower, a glass bowl sink on an acacia slab, a wall hung WC and space to sit and relax. The room is finished in a mixture of plaster, hemp and lime render, tadelakt and reclaimed chestnut.

L'Atelier d'Artiste - downstairs

L'Atelier d'Artiste is an 'appartement d'hôte', and also accommodates one couple. It's a huge space of, in total, 120 square metres (which usually equates to at least a three bedroomed gîte around here!) over two levels, originally converted by Grillou's previous owner from barns and a cowshed into an art restoration studio and workshop. We've renovated the whole area using natural materials, and furnished in a quirky and contemporary French country style with a mixture of new and reclaimed furniture. As in all our accommodation we've used natural paints and washes, home made using natural earth pigments.

Downstairs there's a very practical open plan kitchen with oak units and worktops, a four ring gas hob, full size electric oven, fridge with freezer compartment, washing machine and dishwasher. It's been designed by cooks for cooks and so you'll find plenty of good pans and utensils, sharp knives, gadgets, kettle, espresso machine, cook books plus simple but stylish white crockery and decent glasses. The kitchen is stocked with a supply of basic foodstuffs (herbs, spices, tea, coffee, flour, sugar, oil, vinegar, pasta, tinned tomatoes etc etc), kitchen roll, dishwasher tablets, washing liquid and environment friendly cleaning materials.

There's a dining area which seats four people in comfort; opposite is a sitting area with a squashy sofa and two armchairs plus an antique dresser full of table linen and other essentials

Large double glass doors give directly onto a gravelled terrace outside, where there is a small table and two chairs; a few steps away, under the shade of cherry and walnut trees, is a paved dining terrace with a table, four chairs and parasol.

To be continued ......

La P'tite Maison

La P'tite Maison is our chambre d'hote suite; created from a former farm worker's house, it now forms a completely self-contained suite for two people of around 65 square metres, over 3 levels and with access from the dining room/library in the main house.

Downstairs is a spacious private hall area leading into a salon with sofa and comfy chairs (pictures coming just as soon as the chairs have been delivered!), a mini-TV system with French plus some English, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch channels as well as some good radio, and a combined hi-fi/DVD player/iPod dock. There's a small dining table with two chairs, a small silent fridge, some cutlery, crockery and glasses so that you have the means to put yourself together a picnic supper, and a kettle plus tray of ground coffee, tea and tisanes.

Upstairs is a landing leading to a double height bedroom with leather double bed; from the bedroom a flight of stairs leads to a mezzanine level chill out area with low chairs and floor cushions, candles, incense and music. The shower room has a tiled 90cm x 90cm thermostatic shower with glass door, a contemporary wash basin and oak shelving, and there's a separate WC.