‘I saw an advert for a shop for €40,000 on a Thursday, saw it the following Monday, and bought it Tuesday’

Douarnenez is a charming little seaside town with several ports and some beautiful beaches.

I enjoy living close to nature where I can watch the changes in the seasons through the changes in the landscape. And of course, I live right beside the sea, so no need to go anywhere else in the summer.

There is a thriving community of artists, musicians and writers in the area too. The local cuisine is very good, with lots of fresh fish available and the addition of Breton crèpes and Breton cider are hard to beat.

However, I have to admit that little did I know what I was letting myself in for when I decided to leave the comfort of my heated studio in Paris to meet the bitter winds of winter in coastal Brittany and to face the headaches of the renovations required in an old building.

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What happened was that I saw an advertisement for a shop for €40,000 in Douarnenez on the internet on a Thursday, arranged an appointment to see the place on the following Monday and bought it that Tuesday.

There have certainly been a few hiccups on the way and, to date, I have to admit that it is still not quite clear what the final bill for the renovations will be

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

However, it hasn’t worked out as simply as all that, of course.

There have certainly been a few hiccups on the way and, to date, I have to admit that it is still not quite clear what the final bill for the renovations will be.

Great unwashed

I arrived with my cat, Minouche, and all my stuff in October 2021 and spent the first nine months living here without a heating system and with neither a kitchen nor a bathroom.

My friend, Marie-Hélène lent me her two-ring electric cooker and I heated water in kettles to wash the dishes. I went to the local swimming pool by bike from time to time for a shower. Actually, I used to go to their bien être or wellbeing facility where they had a Jacuzzi, a hamamm and a sunroom. But there were times when I was very much one of the great unwashed.

Since there was no heating whatsoever in the place, I bought a portable gas heater, which was effective while it was operational but which also made me feel drowsy. Then my sister Pat sent me an electric blanket which was actually a big save against the freezing cold in bed at night.

I had to deal with some difficulties with the co-ownership and I’m sure that this situation was more difficult because I’m not French.

First of all, I got a letter accusing me of illegally constructing the co-owned wall in the kitchen when it was obvious that I was simply doing repairs. Then my neighbour wanted to hang her washing directly outside my kitchen door in our yard. Later, it turned out that the leak in my bathroom was coming from another neighbour’ apartment. She duly had this repaired but then demanded that I pay half of the repair bill which she wasn’t entitled to do.

The plaster outside and inside the kitchen and in the bathroom had to be removed to facilitate insulation. That done, it became apparent that several rotten beams would have to be replaced in the kitchen and, worse still, that the kitchen window would have to be shifted 20cm since the wall encasing it was damp.

Money, money and more money!

I began to understand what it meant to have bought a slice of a defective old building dating from 1903 at the cheaper end of town.

Woodcut prints

It is certainly difficult to focus on doing artwork while trying to do renovations at home, but I am currently working on a series of large-format woodcut prints inspired by a set of tall engraved stones in a megalithic cairn at Gavrinis in Brittany.

It was constructed around 3500 BC as part of a spiritual cult to respect the dead. Twenty nine carved stones line the passage of this burial site on both sides of a narrow corridor and decorate the walls and roof of a small room at the end.

Newgrange in Ireland, one of the most important megalithic structures in Europe, shares many similarities with Gavrinis in Brittany, though Newgrange differs in that in addition to being a passage tomb, its entrance is also aligned with the rising sun at the winter solstice so that the sun can flood through a roofbox at the winter equinox. Newgrange was built in 3200 BC, a little later than Gavrinis.

Since there was no written language at that time in Europe and since these engravings are mainly abstract, we can have no idea as to their meaning for the people of that time

It is interesting that both Gavrinis and Newgrange share a similar architectural identity and that this kind of architecture was not just limited to Brittany and Ireland. In fact, these kinds of remains belong and are visible throughout most of northern Europe. They can also be found in the Parisian region, in Sweden, in the Netherlands and as far as Poland.

[ Sitting in the Rolls-Royce I thought, ‘I don’t care if you pay me – I’d do this for free’ ]

[ ‘In a way, my old dream of becoming an astronaut sort of came true’ ]

However, the architecture at Gavrinis displays perhaps the best megalithic stone carvings that we have of that period of time in Europe.

Since there was no written language at that time in Europe and since these engravings are mainly abstract, we can have no idea as to their meaning for the people of that time.

However, the creation of the cairn at Gavrinis was obviously a matter of great importance to the indigenous people of the time since the huge boulders used to create the interior of the cairn had to be transported both by sea and by land, following which each stone had to be engraved, a procedure which took about five months.

• Valerie Vahey is an Irish painter and printmaker. She has lived France since 1989. She grew up in a large family in Killiney, Co Dublin, “before Killiney became posh”. Vahey left Ireland in 1983 and travelled in Asia, spending three months in China. In many places, she met people who had never seen a foreigner before. After that, Vahey went to Japan and lived in Kyoto for five years studying woodblock printmaking before returning to Paris in 1989 to continue printmaking. She lived in Paris until recently when she bought a shop in Douarnenez, Brittany with the idea of transforming the space into a print workshop.
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