Almost everyone who buys in France starts with the same picture in their head. Stone walls, blue shutters, a wisteria over the door, a little land. It is a good picture, and plenty of people go on to buy exactly that and never regret it.
But somewhere between the first viewing trip and the third, a lot of buyers quietly change their minds. Not because the old houses stopped being beautiful, but because they started adding up what it costs to live in one.
This is an honest look at both sides. We build new homes, so we have a view — but you should know what you are giving up either way.
What an old French house costs to run
This is where most of the difference sits, and it is bigger than people expect.
A typical older French rural property has little or no wall insulation, single or early double glazing, and heating that is either electric convectors or an oil boiler of a certain age. There is no mystery to why it costs what it costs: you are paying to heat the garden through the walls.
Our new homes are built to the current French standard, RE2020, and carry a DPE energy rating of A. Typical heating costs run at €30 to €35 a month, all year round, for a family house. If you have owned a French property before, you will know that is not a normal number.
Over ten years, the gap between those two ways of living is not a rounding error. It is a kitchen, or a car, or several very good holidays.
The repairs you inherit
The purchase price of an old house is only the part you can see.
A roof is twenty to forty thousand euros. Rewiring an old farmhouse is ten to twenty. Replacing a fosse septique that no longer meets standards is five to twelve. Insulating and re-plastering internally, replacing windows, dealing with damp in a north wall — each of those is a real number, and the survey culture in France is thinner than in Britain, so buyers often discover them afterwards.
Some of it you plan for. Some of it arrives in year three. A new build arrives with none of it, and with ten years of structural cover behind it.
What you can change, and what you cannot
Old French houses were built around how people lived a century ago: small rooms, thick internal walls, low ceilings in places, a kitchen tucked at the back facing away from the light. You can open some of that up. Structural walls, stairwell positions and window openings in stone are harder and more expensive than people imagine, and in some communes the planning rules limit what you may alter externally.
With a new build the layout is a conversation before anything is poured. Where the light falls, where the kitchen sits, how many bedrooms, whether you want a garage integrated or separate, single storey or not. It costs nothing to move a wall on a drawing.
The legal protection that comes with a new build
This is the part British and Irish buyers tend to underrate, because there is no real equivalent at home.
A new home in France is built under a CCMI contract — the Contrat de Construction de Maison Individuelle. The price is fixed and legally binding from signature, you pay in stages only as verified work is completed, and a guarantor stands behind delivery at the agreed price and date. On top of that sits Dommages-Ouvrage insurance, which covers structural defects for ten years and pays to put them right without you having to prove who was at fault first.
Buying an existing house gives you none of that. The notaire checks the title and any charges on the property, which is real protection, but nobody guarantees the quality of the work the previous owner had done. Undeclared extensions, works carried out without the right permissions, and boundaries that do not quite match the plan are all things we see.
The part most people miss: what you can let, and what you can sell
France has begun legislating badly performing homes out of the rental market, and the timetable is already running.
Under the Loi Climat et Résilience, a home rated G can no longer be let as a main residence — that came into force on 1 January 2025. F follows on 1 January 2028, and E on 1 January 2034. Owners of F and G properties have also been unable to raise the rent since 2023 until the property is improved.
Think about what that means if you are buying a house you might one day let, or sell to someone who wants to let it. A large slice of France's older rural housing stock sits at E, F and G. Those homes have a deadline attached, and every year that passes brings the next date closer.
We would be careful about promising that a new build will be worth more in five years — nobody honestly knows, and a new house does carry a premium the day you buy it, much as a new car does. But a home rated A is on the right side of every rule France has written in the last decade, and the pool of buyers who can do something with it only gets larger.
Where an old house still wins
We would not be much use to you if we pretended otherwise.
Character is real and it is not reproducible. A 200-year-old longère with beams and a bread oven has something a new house will not have for a very long time. Established gardens, mature trees and old stone walls take decades. Old houses are often in the middle of villages, close to the boulangerie and the square, where new plots tend to sit on the edge. And an existing house is available now — you can be in it for Christmas, where a new build is a matter of months.
There is also the entry price. An older property in need of work can be bought cheaply, and if you have the skills, the time and the patience to do the work yourself over several years, the sums can come out well.
The mistake is not choosing the old house. The mistake is choosing it while assuming it will cost what the asking price says.
The short version
On running costs, the new build wins clearly — DPE A against the E, F or G that much of the older stock sits at.
On repairs, the new build wins: everything is new and covered for ten years, against a queue of jobs of uncertain timing.
On layout, the new build wins if you want something specific, and the old house wins if you fall in love with one exactly as it is.
On legal protection, the new build wins on the building itself, through the CCMI and Dommages-Ouvrage. Both are equally well protected on the land transfer, because the notaire handles that either way.
On charm and location, the old house often wins, and there is no point arguing with it.
On what you can let out in ten years' time, the new build wins, and that gap widens every year.
Where to start
If you want to see what building actually costs, our house and land packages show real plots across Brittany, Normandy and the Vendée with a turnkey home, priced all in, with no land price hidden in the small print.
If you are still weighing it up, book a free thirty-minute call. We will give you an honest answer even when it is "buy the old one" — we renovate as well as build, and we would rather you ended up in the right house.