Couple sold their semi in Kent and escaped to a nine-bed French chateau... for ... trends now

Sitting in the vast, high-ceilinged kitchen of their very own chateau, sunlight pouring through windows that look out over a vista of rural bliss, Heidi and Anthony Muir are a vision of contentment.

There hasn't been sight or sound of a car on the tiny single-track lane outside their front door all day, and save for the two donkeys in the field opposite and their French neighbour Bernard tending to his vegetable garden, all is utterly, blissfully tranquille.

'Listen,' urges Heidi with a grin. 'There's just nothing.'

And there isn't, not a whisper, save for the wind and the occasional chirrup of bird song.

If Heidi and Anthony look like the very definition of cats who got the cream, it's frankly not surprising. This time last year the couple were fighting through traffic every day on their respective commutes from their four-bedroom semi on the outskirts of Maidstone, Kent.

After several decades of seemingly relentless development, by the time the couple loaded all their earthly possessions on to a removal van late last summer, their once peaceful home on the fringes of town was beginning to feel like the heart of a heaving metropolis.

'There were houses being built all the time, not just a few, but thousands,' says Heidi.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when plans were passed for two separate developments of 6,000 and 4,000 homes, and the prospect of all the new owners' cars on the roads.

'We used to be able to pop to town in four minutes and back out again, but it got to the point where it could take 40 minutes just to go into Maidstone,' says Anthony, 53. 

'One day, there was a traffic jam in front of our house — I had to queue to get off the driveway and it was only going to get worse.'

The solution? You're looking at it. Last summer, the Muirs sold their suburban semi for £600,000 and snapped up Chez Jallot — a four-storey (five if you include the cellars), nine-bedroom chateau in the middle of one of the most peaceful corners of rural France — for £370,000, a sum only around £50,000 more than the average price of an English home.

For that, the couple didn't just get a modern, well-insulated and double-glazed manor house, they also got two comfortable gîtes and an already flourishing bed and breakfast business.

It's the kind of escape to the country wistful urbanites dream of — but rather than doing it here and saddling themselves with the inflated cost of extra space, Heidi and Anthony had other ideas.

'You can find remote country houses in England, but we didn't want a mortgage,' says Heidi, a 55-year-old mother-of-three, who grins from ear to ear each time she looks around the sprawling stone-clad residence of which she is now the proud chatelaine.

Chez Jallot is certainly remote, standing in a tiny hamlet — also called Chez Jallot — which is currently home to eight residents (shortly to drop to five when an existing homeowner and her children make a temporary retreat to New Zealand).

The hamlet is nestled in La Creuse, which is part of the Limousin, in central France, the French equivalent of the Lake District. The small settlement of granite buildings look like they have been carved from the land that time forgot.

And Chez Jallot (the chateau) nearly was the house that time forgot, having served as a French Resistance headquarters during the World War II until it was set on fire by the occupying German troops in 1944.

It was then, as fans of Channel 4's Grand Designs will know, restored in 2004 by another British couple, Doug Ibbs and Deni Daniel. Their efforts to turn what were essentially four granite walls with no roof into a habitable abode became one of the most popular shows in the programme's history.

This history is all part of the allure for Heidi and Anthony. Like many of us, they occasionally harboured Grand Design dreams of their own as they raised their two sons and daughter in their Kent home, a house that was Heidi's grandmother's when it was built in the 1930s, then her mother's and then theirs. (Heidi bought it in 1993 and they were mortgage free by the time they sold.)

'We always watched the show,' says Heidi. 'And this one [the episode featuring Chez Jallot] was so memorable, it was a massive inspiration. But we had three young children then and weren't looking for a project.'

Circumstances changed when Heidi was made redundant from her job as services manager at a local boarding school. Anthony was happy working at a cycling centre, but increasingly frustrated by his commute, and the couple realised that with two of their children living and working in London and the third happily at university, a whole new chapter lay ahead.

It was not so much a mid-life crisis as a mid-life revelation that propelled a total upheaval.

The Muirs began scouring the internet looking not just for property, but for regions in which to buy. They hadn't even visited La Creuse prior to getting in their car in January 2022, taking the ferry from Dover to Calais and driving the seven hours south. Rather, they alighted upon the region because of its appeal on paper, after a failed attempt to find something further north in Brittany or Normandy.

'We'd been pursuing another house, but that fell through, so we thought we have to take this more seriously,' says Anthony. 'We put our house on the market and accepted an offer in a week, so we knew we were in a selling position, then said let's go back to France and find this house.'

Back then, they

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