The dream

The first visit

It started, the way a lot of the best things do, more or less by accident.

In 2011 Marc was between jobs. Rather than wait around for the next one, we bought an old Hymer motorhome and spent the best part of two months driving slowly around France with no real plan.

Somewhere along the way we went looking for one of those “cool camping” sites in the Alps. We found Les Dômes de Miage, a campsite in Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, tucked into the valley with the great snow-streaked Dômes de Miage standing over it.

That was it, really. The love affair started there.

The campsite is sadly no longer open (the mazot can still be rented though, at Nature & Lodge). But the place got under our skin: the clean mountain air, the long hot summer days, the cool nights, the way the peaks change colour in the evening. Of all the corners of France we drifted through that summer, Saint-Gervais was the one we kept coming back to, year after year.

And, as you do, every time we wandered into town we’d stop at the estate agents’ windows, look at the photographs, and dream a little.

From summers to winters

Several summers went by before we finally saw Saint-Gervais in winter. Our eldest daughter, now a qualified ski instructor, took to the slopes straight away. Our younger daughter was rather more interested in the cafés and the chocolat chaud (hot chocolate), which is its own kind of expertise.

Over time the daydreaming turned into something more deliberate. We started looking properly. We viewed dozens of chalets, walked plenty of empty plots, and came close on a couple of them. But it was all a bit Goldilocks: nothing was ever quite right.

Then Covid arrived, and everything paused.

The plot we almost bought

In 2022 we came back to the valley with fresh energy and a shortlist. It came down to two plots. One sat higher up, on the ski-bus route, with the return piste within walking distance. On paper, perfect. We put in an offer and it was accepted.

(Buying in France is not like buying in England. An accepted offer carries real weight and there’s no gazumping, though we’d later learn the buyer has a little more room to step back than the seller does. More on that in a later chapter.)

Then the doubts crept in. The plot was on an almost vertical slope, and the plans already drawn up for it weren’t quite the dream we’d pictured. As it happened, the same vendor was selling another plot: lower down, with wonderful views, a bakery about twenty minutes’ walk away, and the hole already dug. Same price.

We changed our minds. This time we committed properly.

Full circle: from campsite to Chalet Miage

And so our Saint-Gervais story came full circle. We’d gone from a campsite under the Dômes de Miage to a plot of our own, a few minutes down the valley, with the same mountains on the horizon.

The story of Chalet Miage had begun.