Cook and author Peta Mathias with her local fishmonger, Philippe, in the medieval town of Uzes in southern France, where she spends the Northern Hemisphere summer.
It sounds idyllic, escaping the doldrums of a New Zealand winter to spend summers living in France – but even paradise comes with a cost.
A chateau in Bordeaux. A hilltop villa in Provence. An apartment in Biarritz. A bolthole in the medieval town of Toulouse.
The number of high-profile New Zealanders buying homes in France to escape the New Zealand winter is on the rise – and who can blame them?
In the Dordogne, where food writer Annabel Langbein is currently spending her first summer in a converted 17th-century farmhouse, today’s forecast is for sun and a high of 35C.
The village markets are bursting with berries, peaches and plums, alfresco restaurants are pouring newly released vintages of rose, and the fields are full of sunflowers.
Another recent arrival in France is private investigator Julia Hartley Moore, who moved into her new apartment in Biarritz, on the Basque coast, in May.
Former Black Cap Adam Parore and partner Libby Price own a 400-year-old chateau in Bordeaux, and fashion designer Dame Trelise Cooper has been spending summers in France with husband Jack for the past 15 years, at their house in Toulouse.
Langbein and two other Kiwi bon vivants talk about what it’s like to live with a foot in both worlds.
Fatty edible dormice (glis glis, to call them by their scientific name) are a delicacy in Slovenia and Croatia. Apparently, the ancient Romans snacked on the rodents with a drizzling of honey and poppy seeds.
But when food writer Annabel Langbein and her husband Ted found a nest of them living in the pantry cupboard of the house they’d just bought in France, she was horrified.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m not eating that!’” she says. “They’re the size of a small possum and quite fierce. So that was alarming.”
The wildlife in New Zealand has never seemed so benign. When they arrived three months ago to spend their first summer in St Aubin de Cadaleche, a tiny village in the Dordogne region, the floor of the house was carpeted with dead stink bugs that had emerged from winter hibernation.
A few weeks later, a pine marten (a larger version of a stoat) came down the chimney and made such a mess they had to throw out a couch and replace the carpet.
Outside, a family of snakes is nesting in the garden, and the summer soundscape of cicadas is interspersed by a chorus of giant frogs that Langbein likens to the sound of strangled magpies.
Of course, she’s loving (almost) every minute of it, settling into a new rhythm that includes frequenting the local markets.
“I have my favourite growers – that lady does gorgeous beetroot, that man does nice eggs, and that person over there grows lovely peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers. Then there’s a man who does incredible duck. And I am a duck slut,” she says, with a laugh.
“We both can’t believe how at home we feel here. Even doing simple things feels like an adventure, so you wake up with a sense of excitement because you don’t know what the day will bring.”
Over the past 30 years, Langbein had come to know this southwestern corner of France during regular visits to her close friend and mentor, Daniele Mazet-Delpeuch, a famed chef who died in 2024.
After looking at dozens of properties that weren’t quite right, she and Ted bought Le Brugeau last year.
Situated about an hour and a half from Bordeaux, the six-bedroom home combines two adjoining limestone barns, with a self-contained guest apartment, the Porcherie, that was once the farm’s piggery.
Since arriving in May, Langbein has been cataloguing their progress in weekly social media posts – from the hard slog of getting the house and grounds into shape, to trawling the local produce and bric-a-brac markets, and exploring the Chemin d’Amadour, an ancient pilgrim route that runs through their land.
Unlike the extensive garden at her home in Wānaka, which has inspired so many of her seasonal cookbook recipes, Langbein is taking a much more low-maintenance approach here, thanks to the affordable organic produce that is so readily available.
“In the last month or so, everyone’s been getting green walnuts to make walnut wine. People make their own confit and preserve their own foie gras.
“Go to the hardware store and they’ll be selling fresh bread, fresh chicken, fresh duck and all these different wines. It’s so much part of their culture.”
The airport at Bergerac, their closest town, is only a 15-minute drive away and has direct flights to London, where their son Sean lives. Daughter Rose, who has collaborated with her mother on several cookbooks and co-authors a weekly newsletter, is based in Portugal.
Next month, Langbein and Ted head home to Wānaka, which sits at almost exactly the same latitude in the Southern Hemisphere as Saint-Aubin-de-Cadaleche does in the north.
Exploding with spring growth, the garden will need their attention, but Langbein isn’t happy about missing the main truffle season in France, which runs from the end of November to February. “At some point, I’ve got to be here for that.”
When Richard Burton asked her to marry him (no, not that Richard Burton), Anne Batley was already wearing a stunning diamond on her finger and decided she didn’t need another one.
So he gave her a swimming pool for the house she’d recently bought in France as an engagement ring instead.
“He said, ‘Well, I can’t compete with that’ – the one I already had,” she says, wiggling her finger. “We’ve been married for 25 years.”
Batley Burton, who starred on the Real Housewives of Auckland reality TV series in 2016, has come home early this year from her summer residence in Provence to stand on the C&R ticket at the local body elections in October.
Known as The Champagne Lady, she imports Champagne Jacquart and a range of French wines, hosting private tastings. Through her charity, the NZ Cat Foundation, she also houses some 400 rescue cats at the “Pussy Palace”, her country estate in Huapai.
In June, she broke her shoulder after being accidentally hit by her husband’s car in the driveway of their city home in Parnell, trying to stop a roaming cat from running on to a busy road.
Uncomfortable as it’s been, the injury has barely slowed her down, judging by the string of photos and videos she’s shared on Instagram from her latest stay at Domaine Des Abeilles, her hilltop villa in Le Thoronet.
Whether it’s on her terrace, overlooking the vineyards that carpet the Argens valley below, or dining at a favourite restaurant in one of the surrounding villages, she’s typically seen with a glass in hand – and often dancing in a fabulously floral dress and sky-high stiletto shoes.
“What I love is that I feel more relaxed there,” she says. “In a way, it’s like going back in time.”
Batley Burton has had a penchant for la vie francaise since she began learning French at a private school for young ladies in Auckland when she was 5.
In her late 20s, she met the first of a string of French boyfriends and lived on and off in France for many years, renting villas in different parts of the country before deciding to buy a place of her own in the late 90s.
The day before she was due to fly back to New Zealand, after a fruitless search, she was shown one last property that had been left unfinished when the owner struck financial problems.
“So off we went along this windy little chemin [road] about 10 minutes from Lorgues and then up this goat track, bombity, bombity, bom.
“The house was a concrete block, surrounded by clay. Upstairs, it was all closed off and in a state of disarray. But the view was to die for. I just fell in love with it.“
The following year, she met Richard back in New Zealand. The couple spent the next decade gradually bringing the three-bedroom villa up to scratch, and Batley Burton says he loves France as much as she does.
The swimming pool, a priority when they began renovations, is right outside their bedroom on the ground floor.
“We just open the shutters, walk out and dive in,” she says. “Well, I get in and dog paddle with my hat on, my dark glasses and a glass of Champagne. That’s me in the pool.”
To misquote Mark Twain, reports of Peta Mathias abandoning her “beautiful life” in the south of France have been greatly exaggerated.
It’s true that her loft-style home in the sun-drenched medieval town of Uzes is on the market, but French real estate agents are notoriously laissez-faire and right now, she has no intention of letting it go.
“When I decided to sell the house, I was sick, I had a major problem with a neighbour, and I’d also had a major drain problem, so there was black sludge all over the downstairs bathroom,” she says.
“I just threw my hands up and I thought, ‘Dang this, I can’t stand it.’ Now I’m not sick any more and all the other problems have been resolved.
“This is what always happens, you see. I slowly get back into my French life, which is so different from my New Zealand life, and I’m happy again. I can’t give this up – it’s too special.”
A cook, author, tour guide and self-described gastronomad, Mathias began her love affair with France in 1980, when she moved to Paris and opened a restaurant – frequented (according to her 2016 memoir Never Put All Your Eggs in One Bastard) by “left-wing intellectuals, arms dealers, local artists and philandering husbands”.
For the past two decades, she’s divided her life between Auckland and Uzes, in the Occitanie region near Nimes, where her cooking classes begin with a trip to the local market.
Famous for its wine and olive oil, the Mediterranean town is also a handy base for the “culinary adventures” she hosts in Spain, Italy and Portugal (next year’s schedule includes a luxury shopping tour of India).
It all sounds absolutely fabulous – and, mostly, it is. But Mathias, now in her mid-70s, is refreshingly candid about the challenges of this life that she’s chosen and the sacrifices it has required.
“I gave up husbands and children so I could live this double life,” she says. “It’s very expensive, it’s very disruptive, and I’m constantly dealing with dramas, so you have to be resilient.
“But I knew quite young that I wasn’t meant for husbands and children and a stable life and a stable job and living in the same house. I wanted excitement, adventure and romance, and that never stopped. Most people get sensible and grow out of it. I never did.”
One of the enchanting things about the culture of southern France is an acceptance of imperfection, says Mathias. “You see it in the architecture, design, cooking, their acceptance of foreigners.” Not to mention their saucy sense of humour.
“I like French people. I like that they’re snappy. I like that they’re impatient. I like that they think they have the best culture in the world. I like their self-confidence, because we’re so shy in New Zealand. We never blow our own trumpet.”
Mathias heads back to Auckland next month for the launch of her new book, It’s Been Six Weeks Since My Last Confession, a collection of “scurrilous” essays due out in mid-October.
Long-haul travel is becoming more tiring, and she accepts that one day a hard choice will have to be made – which is why her eclectic, three-storey apartment is still officially for sale.
“It’s hilarious, the [real estate] agents do nothing in France. The market isn’t particularly buoyant at the moment, and it’s going to be a hard house to sell because it’s unusual. So I’m just gonna let nature take its course.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.