If you are looking at new build in France, you will keep meeting four characters: RE2020. It is the environmental regulation every new home in the country must now be built to, and it is the single biggest reason a new French house behaves so differently from an old one.
It is worth understanding properly, because it is doing more for your monthly costs than any estate agent's description will tell you.
What RE2020 actually is
RE2020 is France's current environmental building regulation, and it is among the most demanding in Europe. It replaced the previous standard, RT2012, and it moved the goalposts in three directions at once.
The first is energy. A house has to use very little of it, which means serious insulation, high-performance glazing, and heating systems chosen for efficiency rather than for the lowest installation cost.
The second is carbon. RE2020 looks not only at how much energy the house consumes once you live in it, but at the carbon cost of building it in the first place — the materials, the construction, the whole life of the building. That is a genuine shift, and it is why the regulation pushed the industry towards heat pumps and away from gas.
The third is summer comfort. French summers have changed, and RE2020 sets requirements for how a house behaves in a heatwave, not just in January. A well-built new home should stay bearable in August without you bolting an air conditioning unit to the wall.
What it means in practice
Standards are abstract. Bills are not.
The homes we build to RE2020 carry a DPE energy rating of A, the highest in France, and typical heating costs run at €30 to €35 a month, all year round. Not for a studio — for a family house. That figure surprises people who have owned a French property before, and it is the clearest way to understand what the regulation is actually for.
The reason is not one clever component but the combination: a properly insulated envelope, double glazing throughout, mechanical ventilation, a reversible heat pump that heats in winter and cools in summer, and a thermodynamic hot water cylinder that draws warmth from the surrounding air rather than heating water from scratch. Each one is unremarkable on its own. Together they change what the house costs to live in.
Old property against new build
The romance of French property is a stone longère with shutters and a wisteria. We understand the appeal, and we renovate them for people who want exactly that. But the running-cost gap between a DPE A house and the E, F or G that much of France's older rural stock sits at is not small, and it is a gap you pay every month for as long as you own the place. There is also a ceiling on what insulation can achieve inside stone walls that were never designed for it — very few renovations of a period property reach DPE A.
We have written that comparison out properly, including the repairs you inherit and the energy rules that now decide what can be let out: new build or old house in France, which is really the better buy.
How this shows up in what we build
We build to RE2020 as a matter of course, because there is no legal alternative for a new home in France. What varies between builders is everything around it.
Every house we build is on a fixed-price CCMI contract, so the figure you agree is the figure you pay, and it comes with ten-year structural cover and Dommages-Ouvrage insurance. The design is adapted to how you actually live rather than pulled off a shelf — the plan above is one of our three-bedroom bungalows with an integrated garage, and the internal layout can be moved around to suit you. And we handle the whole journey, from finding the plot to handing you the keys, in English.
Where to start
If you are curious about what a new build would cost on a specific plot, our house and land packages show real plots with a turnkey home, priced all in.
Or book a free thirty-minute call and we will talk through what you are trying to do. No obligation, and no pressure — most of the people we speak to are still a year or two away from moving.