Delightful Self-Contained Apartment with Pool

Toulouse Homebase details

Move your mouse over the thumbnail to view

Visitors' garden looking over the pool

Village side of the house

Visitors' entrance to the ground floor apartment

Home description

An all-seasons touring or househunting base for two people. Quiet and comfortable, with lots to do and see within easy reach, summer and winter.

Accommodation detail

Looking towards the indoor garden

The bedroom

The living room

Move your mouse over the thumbnail to view

The apartment is completely self-contained at one end of a seventeeth-century farmhouse, and has its own entrance hall with living/dining room (4 x 5m) to one side and bedroom (3,5 x 3,5m) opposite, with kingsize four-poster double bed. Visitors sleeping separately can make use of the comfortable double convertible sofa in the living room.

The tiled kitchen is through an arch off the living room, and is fully equipped with gas/electric cooker, microwave oven, refrigerator, dishwasher, glassware, plates and cutlery. Beyond the kitchen is a shower room with Italian tiled thermostatic shower, basin and WC.

The living room has a floor of chestnut boards, plastered walls with old half-timbering, and is equipped with a sofa and easy chairs, a glass topped rattan dining table with chairs to match, a bookcase, French television. Telephone and Internet connections are available by arrangement. There is oil-fired central heating with thermostatically controlled radiators throughout, as the apartment was designed for winter as well as summer use. Covered parking is in a barn near the entrance, with carwashing facilities.

Also available

A glass door off the living room leads to a glass-roofed indoor garden converted from a barn, with stairs up to a lookout with a big corner window from which you can enjoy long views over rolling woods and fields to the south and west, and watch the often spectacular sunsets. Below, there is a boiler room where clothes can be washed in the machine there or dried beside the boiler in wet weather. There is an outdoor clothesline for normal use.

Outside

The farmhouse is a long spread of barns and living quarters joined up over several centuries. It faces the quiet village street on the east, and the side away from the village looks over open country and our seven acres of woodland wilderness. We are cutting paths through this and will soon be able to take evening strolls in comfort.

The ground near the house is now a long garden, and at the visitors' end, screened by willows, a swimming pool (4 x 12m) has been dug into the hillside to make a suntrap with a view. There is a pear tree on the grass mound overlooking the pool which makes a shady place for visitors to sit and eat outdoors, and there is a portable barbecue for use nearby. Garden furniture and sunbeds are provided.

About the location

There are no shops in Marignac, but you need only go to Martres Tolosane (5 mins) or Cazères (15 mins) which both have weekly markets. St Girons (40 mins) has a Saturday market where working hippies come down from the Ariège with their produce. St Gaudens (30mins) is good for basic shopping and has bars and restaurants with views of the mountains. There are many other interesting market towns worth a visit within easy reach.

Toulouse, the rose red city, has a compact historic centre packed with good things - architecture, museums, galleries, exhibitions, concerts, markets, shops and restaurants. So the best plan is to drive direct to an underground carpark in the centre, and then walk. There are organised tourist taxis, and tour boats on the Canal du Midi. An alternative is to go in by train from nearby Boussens.

Spain is so near (one hour) that circular day trips are possible: a good one is to follow the Tour de France route up a steep wooded valley to the ski station of Le Mourtis, have a drink and admire the view, then descend into Spain and have a tapas lunch at a village where the broad Garonne river is still a tumbling brook. Then come back into France by the spa town Bagnères de Luchon where you can take a vertiginous cable car ride from the centre of the town up to the ski station of Superbagnères, and even more spectacular mountain scenery. If you like, you can arrange to ride down as pillion passenger on a hang glider: If this idea doesn't appeal, you can just watch the locals as they launch themselves into space, and then get back into the cable car - which is exciting enough for us.

See Local guide and map for information on nearby towns and facilities.

Activities near by

Fishing, Walking, Swimming, Canoeing, Horse riding, Water sports, Skiing, Sightseeing

See Activities and attractions for more information on nearby activities and places of interest.

How to get here

Ideally located 45 minutes south of Toulouse airport, and one hour north of the Pyrenees, the nearest ski station, and the Spanish border, Marignac-Laspeyres is a delightful small hilltop village ten minutes west of junction 22 on the A64 Toulouse-Biarritz motorway, and we are in the village next to the château.

See Local guide and map for information on nearby towns and airports.