Buy a run-down house abroad and write a bestseller about the pain and pleasures of renovation, detailing your own hapless language and DIY skills and the quirks of local life — it has proved a winning formula. One of the first to do it was Peter Mayle, the author of A Year in Provence. That book and its sequel, Toujours Provence, were among the titles in this year’s Sunday Times 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years.
“The dream of buying a wreck abroad has really taken root in the past 40 years as a theme that resonates,” Jelena Cvjetkovic from the estate agency Savills says. “Look at the travel writer Eric Newby, who bought in north Tuscany in the 1960s and wrote about his renovation in A Small Place in Italy, and TV programmes like Escape to the Château. They certainly led to more people buying property in those locations.”
What are the travelogues and novels that best evoke an immediate sense of place? For many readers, the trio below have a sensory trigger every bit as memorable as Proust’s madeleine.
A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (1989) — 157 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list.
Before the advent of easyJet and the Channel Tunnel, travel was less democratic, so when A Year in Provence hit the shelves in 1989, it brought the colours and characters of southern France into sharp focus. Sun-starved Brits fell for the romance of Peter Mayle’s new life in a stone house in Ménerbes.
Mayle wrote about the Luberon, an inland swathe of Provence, east of Avignon and north of Aix-en-Provence, with stony villages, olive groves and vines. Property interest centres on the prestigious triangle of Ménerbes, Gordes and Bonnieux.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994) — 86 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list.
The story of ill-fated love on Cephalonia during the Second World War is a challenging backdrop to entice housebuyers, but Louis de Bernières’s novel arguably did more to promote Greece’s tourism industry than anything — except, perhaps, Mamma Mia!.
“Especially after it was made into a Hollywood film, Captain Corelli significantly enhanced Cephalonia’s international profile, drawing interest from tourists and second-home buyers,” says Savvas Savvaidis from Greece Sotheby’s International Realty. “We’ve seen similar trends in Corfu following the popularity of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals.”
Expect to pay between €600,000 and €800,000 for a good quality three-bedroom house on Cephalonia, Savvaidis says. “On Mykonos a three-bedroom house that would have cost €300,000 in 2000 would now start from €1 million, while a property selling for €180,000 on Corfu in 2000 would now be €700,000.”
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes (1996) — 130 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list
Under the Tuscan Sun tells the story of the American Frances Mayes’s renovation of Bramasole, an elegant villa in rural Cortona, on the Tuscany-Umbria border.