Your hosts

 

Your hosts are Paul and Lara Smith and we invite you to come and stay at La Roussille.

We originate from the South East of England and fell in love with France many years ago. We have spent our working life in the City of London in the Finance industry but both really knew that we wanted a different life as the years went by. We lived in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast and loved our time there, however we made it our aim to buy our dream home and settle down in the French countryside. We made several trips to France touring around looking at many different areas before falling in love with the idyllic Dordogne countryside. It was then time to call the estate agents and look for the house we would come to call home. We made two, one week long viewing trips to France and found La Roussille after seeing around 10 other properties that just didn’t fit the bill. However, once we drove up to La Roussille, it was love at first sight.

The purchase was made on a cold winter’s day in December 2013. It was the start of our dream, and a big day in our future lives. Once this was completed it was time to plan the large project of converting what was an old, dirty and drafty barn into two luxury gites. We wanted these to be somewhere that we would want to stay. We didn’t want to just deliver two gites that would do the job, we wanted to offer accommodation that people would really appreciate and that we would be proud of. We hope that we have achieved that.

The journey from barn to gites took six years, and it is fair to say that the French building and regulation process kept us on our toes. We had ups and downs, but with the aim of opening our largest gite, Oak Barn for the Christmas of 2019, we pushed on and met this deadline and welcomed our first ever guests. We then moved into Walnut Barn and opened this gite early the following year. Looking back, the good times in the transformation still make us smile, and the not so good times now make us laugh. What more could we have asked for.

So here we are today, many years on from being passed the keys, slightly more grey hairs but a whole lot happier, we invite you to experience a stay at La Roussille. We hope that you take us up on our offer and that it meets all your needs and expectations, and delivers memories that you will take with you forever.

Paul & Lara