At home in the world

British artist Aimee del Valle reveals why she loves French village life

- Aimee del Valle

WE didn’t choose our first home in France. We found it, almost by chance, after a roundabout route through many countries. I had always enjoyed taking in new cultures, the beauty of different landscapes, their scents and, because I was a freelancer, I’d work for six months or so, save up, then travel. During one of those trips, I met the man who would become my husband. After I got pregnant, we had to decide where to make our family happen and stood in front of a map, our fingers hovering over many countries. After spells in Georgia, US—in an apartment surrounded by horses and mice—Guatemala, where my husband is from, and the Netherlands, we moved to France, via England. We left our eldest child with my parents—by then, I was expecting our second baby—and went house-hunting, only to find that, as foreigners with no bank account and freelance careers, it was almost impossible to rent a house.

After 10 days traipsing up and down France, I was exhausted. We tried one more time at an estate agent’s in yet another village, when a lady scribbled a note and passed it to the agent who was talking to us. It turned out she had a house to rent and had a good feeling about us. When she said we could rent her house, we said: ‘Yay!’ and immediately added: ‘By the way, where are we?’