3 French market towns: French Property Location Guide

Le marché is at the heart of French daily culture. Carolyn Reynier picks out three market towns offering a vibrant lifestyle including Dinan, Louhans and Niort…

Last year saw the seventh season of Votre Plus Beau Marché produced by television channel TF1 in partnership with regional daily newspapers. The series highlights some beautiful French towns, all with vibrant markets of course. Here I’ve picked three of my favourites wonderful places to own a holiday or permanent home.

Number six, located in Côtes-d’Armor, Brittany, was subprefecture Dinan. Surrounded by ramparts this Ville d’Art et d’Histoire (twinned with Exmouth) lies inland from the Emerald coast at the head of the Rance river. Its château was built in the 14th century and the houses are half-timbered with corbelling. There was an important English colony here (1800-1940) and you can sail from the port along the estuary to St-Malo and Dinard.

Louhans, a Plus Beaux Détours de France town in Saône-et-Loire, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, came in third. It’s in the heart of the Bresse Bourguignonne in southern Burgundy – with the Côte-d’Or vineyards to the northwest, Mâconnais to the southwest, and to the east the wines, valleys and lakes of Jura. This medieval town on the navigable Seille river is renowned for its all-singing, all-dancing Appellation d’Origine Protégée chicken, the poulet de Bresse. And the winner was… Niort, prefecture of Deux-Sèvres in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, twinned with Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. It sits on the edge of the 207,430-hectare Parc Naturel Régional du Marais Poitevin, the most important wetlands on the Atlantic coast, which also straddles Vendée and Charente-Maritime. Architectural heritage includes Henry Plantagenet’s 12th-century military fortress; Renaissance, Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings; plus contemporary graffiti and mural street art.

Follow the Voie Verte along the banks of the fish-filled River Sèvre on foot, bike or horseback; explore the Venise Verte area of the Marais in a traditional barque; walk along ancient rural paths around the town through marshland, plains and bocage (a patchwork of woodland, heath, small fields and tall hedgerows).

What’s interesting about Dinan is that we’re not far from the coast, Cassady Cooper at Agence Arguenon tells me. “The Rance estuary lies between Dinard and St-Malo, so we have the maritime Rance then a beautiful, slightly undulating landscape upstream to Dinan,” she says. Here, the river transforms into the canal. Dinan sits up above with an unbeatable view over the port, viaduct and valley from the Jardin Anglais on the upper ramparts (from when a large English community lived here).

You reach the port via the steep, picturesque Rue du Jerzual with its terraced and detached stone and timber-framed houses (à pan de bois). Locals aren’t keen on buying here – no cars so you can’t unload shopping – but it does appeal to foreign buyers, which creates “une identité sympa”, says Cassady. There are gardens, lovely views and artists have their ateliers at street level. “C’est plutôt chouette.” (Not an owl in this sense but meaning nice, great).

Inside the ramparts – intra muros – in the historic centre, fine, granite, terraced bourgeois houses (with no more than three storeys) have been converted into apartments with shops at street level. Cassady recently sold a renovated studio on the market square with a view of the ramparts for €115,000. Some townhouses have remained intact. A large maison de maître with garden and in good repair sold for about €700,000.

Dinan is busy year-round so there’s good potential for the investor, however, there is now a quota on authorisations for short-term lets. Intra muros, each house and certain historic areas are listed according to their architectural interest and different rules apply depending on their classification, explains Cassady. You might buy in a building where you can’t touch anything or you might be in one where certain modifications are permitted by the Bâtiments de France architect “qui veille au grain” (keeps a weather-eye open). This has resulted in a “centre-ville magnifique”. Down the valley, you’ll find pretty stone properties, fishermen’s cottages and farms.

At Plouër-sur-Rance, Cassady recently sold for €320,000 a farmstead (corps de ferme) with two bedrooms and outbuilding for conversion, giving a potential of 300m² living space plus 6,000m² of land. Prices are lower in the countryside. Cassady lives in a small quiet old street in the centre of the town, yet can easily access nature by walking down to the port. “There you’re on the tow paths surrounded by greenery, birds, c’est super.”fishermen’s cottages and farms. At Plouër-sur-Rance, Cassady recently sold for €320,000 a farmstead (corps de ferme) with two bedrooms and outbuilding for conversion, giving a potential of 300m² living space plus 6,000m² of land. Prices are lower in the countryside. Cassady lives in a small quiet old street in the centre of the town, yet can easily access nature by walking down to the port. “There you’re on the tow paths surrounded by greenery, birds, c’est super.”

Subprefecture of Saône-et-Loire, Louhans is the city of 157 arcades, says Fabrice Oudot of Neyrat Immobilier. Under these arcades, in terraced stone and sometimes timber-framed buildings, are ground-floor shops. Above, some folk have maintained and done up apartments – Fabrice has just sold a 48m² example under the arcades for €69,000 – others haven’t and use them for storage space. “There’s quite a lot to be done under the arcades,” he says – good news for the bricoleur.

Just behind are terraced townhouses with interior courtyards; a few hundred metres further away from the centre you’ll find small pre- and post-war detached properties with small courtyards and garages priced from €200,000. Fabrice is selling a compact townhouse with an interior courtyard, terrace, garage and no double glazing for €100,000. “It’s a bit vieillot (outdated), but it’s liveable straight away.”

In the surrounding countryside are long timber-framed, red-brick properties – fermes Bressanes. Expect to pay €250,000-€300,000 for a renovated example. Fabrice has one for sale at €89,000, “but everything needs redoing from A to Z”. Farmhouses may come with land although, upon retirement, owners often rent out parcels to other farmers.

If you’re hankering after a house with hectares, you need to know about rural law and the SAFER. Les Sociétés d’aménagement foncier et d’établissement rural allows anyone with a viable project to establish themselves in a rural milieu. If farmland has been rented out by the original owners for such a purpose, you might not get it back. However, Fabrice says you still find farms with anything from 3,000m² to a couple of hectares.

In summer, the tourist board organises ‘Garçon, la note’! Two nights a week, you can listen to a band at a local bar or restaurant in the Bresse bourguignonne. “We have an apéro, there’s a reasonably priced menu, we listen to the music and have a good evening,” says Fabrice. “Then there’s the history attached to our Monday market; stands everywhere, folk are outside, they have a drink, they eat tête de veau,” he continues. “And people come to see the poultry, to experience some of the rural ambiance.” There are lots of gîtes and chambres d’hôtes. “We have a good quality of life, little traffic, nature,” says Fabrice. From Louhans, you can cycle along the 70km Voie Verte La Bressane to Lons-le-Saunier or west to Chalon-sur-Saône. He canoes on the Seille, which flows through Louhans joining the Saône south of Tournon. “Il fait bon vivre ici.”

Nicolas Samuel of 203 Niort Immobilier says you’ll find 18th- and 19th-century terraced houses in the centre of Niort, usually with two upper floors but no outside space. There are “hidden treasures” in certain streets where you open the front gate and come upon majestic properties with lots of charm and history. The price range is €2,500/m²-€3,000/m². Art Nouveau architecture with its long, sinuous lines appeared in the 1890s followed by geometric Art Deco from the 1910s on. Nicolas recently sold a central 150m² 1923 Art Deco property for €140,000. “It needed complete renovation, but sold for less than €1,000 per square metre.” The house is in a conservation area, so the Bâtiments de France architects visited before it went on the market. “They said, the staircase stays, the fireplace stays, the mullion stays…”

If you prefer a town-centre apartment in an old building with cachet, you’ll pay from €120,000 for a renovated two-bedroom example. Apartments in residences dating from the 2000s on the Quai Métayer along the canal cost €2,300/m² to €2,800/m². Prices for three-bedroom houses with garden start in the region of €180,000. Prices in Niort remain more accessible than in other large cities, providing a rare opportunity for first-time buyers, families “looking for space without exploding their budget” and investors.

Niort is the capital of the mutuelles insurance companies. Accommodation is regularly needed for visiting service providers and short-term apartment lets are cheaper than hotels. If you fancy doing up an apartment for renting out, Nicolas has more properties on his books for renovation/freshening up than renovated.

He has lots of foreign buyers – Dutch, Belgians and British who have invested in gîtes around Magné and Coulon at the entry to the Marais Poitevin. Other villages worth investigating include Sansais and Arçais. There are fewer amenities in these hamlets, but prices are lower and you get more space. To the south, Frontenay is popular because it’s on the Niort-La Rochelle main road, but if you want to be en pleine nature, the Marais is number one, says Nicolas.
Paris is under two hours away and on sunny Sundays Nicolas’ family drive for 40 minutes to Charente-Maritime prefecture La Rochelle and the seaside. Niort town centre is lively with the Apéros du mardi, the Jeudis Niortais concerts and outdoor film projections during summer. “We have lovely green spaces, great cycle rides, we can rent electric boats on the Sèvre Niortaise to explore the Marais,” he says. “C’est sympa.”

dinan.fr

dinan-capfrehel.com

vivre-a-niort.com

niortmaraispoitevin.com

louhans-chateaurenaud.fr

bresse-bourguignonne.com

The unique mix of legal, financial and tax advice along with in-depth location guides, inspiring real life stories, the best properties on the market, entertaining regular pages and the latest property news and market reports makes French Property News magazine a must-buy publication for anyone serious about buying and owning a property in France.