Great article from the Sunday Times about the enchanting village of Cotignac in the Var, Provence. The article includes comments from Home Hunts and many of our clients.
The actor, producer and writer Jim Piddock and his partner, Ann Cusack, are spending their first summer in the Provençal farmhouse they bought from the actor Richard E Grant. The three-bedroom house is in the village of Aups, close to Cotignac, in the Var department, France.
The couple, based between Los Angeles, Fulham and now the south of France, first visited Aups to have dinner with Grant and Joan Washington, his late wife. “It was a magical setting: having dinner outside, surrounded by olive trees with views over the ancient rooftops of the village,” says Piddock, 68.
“After coming here for more than 30 summers — Eric Idle introduced us to the area — we’d fallen in love with the Haut-Var region. It feels a million miles away from Hollywood and forces you to appreciate a much simpler, slower life. Men sit outside drinking pastis and playing cards, like in A Year in Provence [the 1989 memoir by Peter Mayle].”
The low-key appeal of the area, which is an hour from the Côte d’Azur, is why it’s popular with high-profile home owners. Tim Swannie, the director of the property search company Home Hunts, puts it down to this, along with “the nature and climate, the medieval villages and chateaux, and easy access from Marseille and Nice airports”.
He says that Home Hunts has just sold a home in Cotignac to a British family and that friends of the Clooneys have just bought a place in the village — they have been dining with them on the terrace of the restaurant Picotte Provence.
