A few weeks ago, I was doing one of my evening visits to the house, and happened on the son of the old lady across the courtyard.
He’s a nice chap, always a bit over talkative, but interesting nonetheless.
I’d already explained my plans about doing a gite for the old place which he seemed to welcome at the time, as did his mother. A few weeks have passed and he’s had time to reflect on what may have been an overzealous response, and he wanted to put the records straight for me before we eventually attacked the work. He’s away on important duties for the State, so he wanted me to know certain oppositions to my schemes before he went.

So thankfully he’s not objecting at all about having a gite – he couldn’t after all, as there are several in the village already.
His worry is the fact that I had told him that I was going to live there on the top floor, and would be using the back door as the front door to the apartment. The door opens onto his mother’s courtyard (of which I have access to come and go as I please).

He says that they ignored the access issue when old lady Doutre lived there because they didnt want to cause problems with her, so they let her have free access, and let her use the door as her main entrance whilst she was living. Now she’s gone they want to revert to the old ‘Servitudes’ law, which basically means that I will have to use the front door as the main entrance to the apartment, or find another way of getting up there from street level.

The front door option is out-of-the-question. I can’t be walking through the gite to get upstairs to an apartment if there are guests there for obvious reasons.
There would be a possibility to open up another entrance on the ‘Place’ side, but thats big work, possible rejection at the Planning stage, and would eat up a section of the interior where I want to site the new sitting room.

Lastly from the terrace on the garden side – again really complicated, expensive and intrusive on guests. It would have to be a sort of spiral stairway in metal going up from ground floor level. Not the ‘look’ I’m after!

So I had to make a really important decision.
I’ve decided that I won’t live there on the attic level, which is a shame, at least not permanently. I had great plans to open up the space, add on another half level and enjoy the spectacular views of the Pyrenees and the Black Mountains. I can’t start annoying a very close neighbour, one who has already said I can cross his land to dig out a pool in the garden. It’s just not worth it.
Instead, I’m going to open it up for the guests. I can put in an extra two large bedrooms, wet room and a 40m2 games room without changing any of the layout or doing any structural work at all. Maybe it’ll be second floor just for the guests’ kids? It makes great sense to let them have a floor of their own at the top of the house, with a games room across the corridor. There’s an idea too of adapting the roof top access (which is already there) to make a sort of mezzanine/viewing point for them, that they could climb up safely.

In all, the gite will now have enough space for 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, a large games room, 40m2 living room and a 40m2 kitchen/diner, without any structural alterations at all.
However to fine tune all that, and to make circulation better, some walls will be coming out and others rebuilt.