We have added more features to our rooms and apartments and we have restructured our prices to give the best value for your holiday and vacation accommodation
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 Poppy Bedroom  Rose bedroom  Sunflower Bedroom
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Our village, Montblanc, is slap-bang in the center of Languedoc just a few miles from the Mediterranean – it is typical of a confident, prosperous farming village in Southern France and for centuries has been a working community. It is much the same today as it has been for the last couple of thousand years.  Building Our New High Street There have always been visitors coming and making their home here. From Hannibal on his way to Italy for the world cup 2,500 years ago (descendants of his war elephants still live in some of the trees in the woodlands around here – to beautiful lasses from the Scottish highlands here a holiday this week – the local villages offer their usual welcome and glasses of wine. Some of our guests are out on a stroll (a balade) this morning – with frequent stops for wine and foie-gras under the trees. Talks about the flora and a team of horse drawn carriages (one mule drawn) are there to bring them home later.
‘Tis a beautiful day. Midsummers day and I’m thinking of Christmas – Spend Christmas 2010 with us in the South of France – enjoy a traditional Christmas dinner, we promise you a very special day. Every year we have enjoyed a real family Christmas – traditionally we start with Oysters and Champagne on the terraces and is just gets better from there. Now the kids have grown up and we have finished work on our Gites an Bed and Breakfast accommodation, this year we look foreword to sharing Christmas with our guests. We don’t promise snow, but from the weather lately nothing would surprise me, we have full central heating as well as air conditioning and log fires. We can cater families, couples or single travelers. Stay with us for Christmas, or for as long as you like. Contact me for more details. When we bought our home in Nizas and decided to rent accommodation, the plan was to offer a series of photographic courses. I am a photographer and I love teaching and working with new ideas and experimental photography. I have spent thousands of hours in darkrooms and traveled many placers on assignments. I did run a couple of courses from Nizas, but it all took a back seat to our gite rentals business and the ascendancy of internet marketing. For most people, digital cameras have replaced film and chemistry. The convenience and cost-saving of printing straight from your computer is wonderful. I now plan to start these courses again from our new home at Villa Roquette and will have all the new facilities ready for an inauguration course in September. The courses are very flexible and run over a four day period, they are designed for people to come for one, two, three or all four days. In this way maximum benefit can be derived and a student can select the modules which give them the best value. The course modules cover both digital and chemical processes, from visualisation to presentation (seeing to showing) and marry together digital techniques and traditional chemical development and printing. My background is in Zone system, black and white, photography – this is just as important and relevant to digital systems and colour. I used my first digital camera in 1978, a 10×8 inch Sinar with a digital back. I will only take a maximum of four students at a time. There is accommodation in Villa Roquette, people can bring their partners and families. Or stay at other places locally, the courses are independent of our accommodation. The fees are 100 euro for each session and there are two sessions covering specific subjects each day. Book as many, or as few, as you wish – I am putting more information on a new blog at 2337.com (it spells BEER) on a phone. Last Minute Announcement. We now have availability Villa Roquette for the last two weeks of August, from the 15th to the 28th for our two bedroom Rose Apartment and our one bedroom Poppy apartment We had reserved these apartments for friends coming to stay with us, but a new arrival in their family has changed their plans so we will be welcoming them all at a later date. As a tree…. or blue sky…..I offer you both from our garden this morning.  Trees and blue sky in the garden at 8am, May 24 2010 I remember hearing “Blue and green should never be seen” – well, it is wrong One of the joys of living here in the South of France is that my mother can live with us in her own private apartment in Villa Roquette. She has always been a keen gardener and we are proud of her results in the Mediterranean climate. An interesting feature of many old houses in France is the wonderful ironwork, railings and metalwork decorations used in houses. The last big job (almost) I plan for Villa Roquette is the front terrace to, what will be, our new front ground floor apartment – this project took a big step forward this week when I finished the brickwork and concreting. it is now ready for the wall and railings.  Terrace for ground floor apartment - a picture window will be fitted next week I decided to make two short pillars and then insert some two meter panels of old railings. When I went round the secondhand builders materials places I discovered that prices for good ornamental railings are high – some over 1,000 euro a meter for wrought iron railings. What I was looking for were the 19th century cast iron railings which many larger houses had. We are lucky, the first floor of our home at Villa Roquette has a balcony of cast iron railings with a vine leaf decoration running the length of our house and I thought it would be great to find something similar, but that I could afford. After a long search and a lot of negotiations I found the perfect pieces.  Cast Railings with a chestnut motif I found two complete balconies in the corner of a field, covered in weeds – in fact I found a treasure trove of railings and balconies – the ones I chose have a Chestnut design of leaves and fruit and are fantastic – they are complete, but need a little repair, but I was once taught how to weld cast iron and plan to put them back to the way they were over 150 years ago In my last newsletter I mentioned a half price offer for B&B – this is valid for bookings ten days of longer and paid on booking. After two years of working on the house and building the apartments and bedrooms – I am back to my desk in a new office and working on the websites. I am having to re-learn a lot as the Internet is continually shifting and reinventing itself, the vast array of choices means there are too many options, many of them bad, and the over-simplification of Content Management Systems means it takes longer to do simple things and even longer to do hard things. So my thrust at present is to cut out all unnecessary sites, keep what is left clean and fast and to add as much content as possible linked into an array of outlets – same as before really. |
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