Brand new 4-bedroom house with two bathrooms in the village centre — Cerisy-la-Salle, Manche

A 640 m² plot in the middle of the village, with a brand new four-bedroom house and two bathrooms built on it for €203,020. For a family, a village-centre plot is worth paying for: the school, the bakery and the shop are a walk rather than a school run.

The house is our four-bedroom design with two bathrooms, over two floors with a garage. The ground floor has a bright open-plan living and dining room opening onto the terrace and garden, a fitted kitchen, a bedroom with its own bathroom, a separate WC and a utility room. Three further bedrooms and a second bathroom sit upstairs. The layout can be adapted to suit you.

The plot is advertised as unserviced with the networks at the boundary and a mains drainage connection required — and mains drainage is the good outcome here, because it means no individual treatment system. Both are surveyed and quoted as part of the works.

About Cerisy-la-Salle

Cerisy-la-Salle sits in the middle of the Manche, in the gentle country between Coutances and Saint-Lô, and it is a working village with a school and a community rather than a hamlet that shuts in winter.

Its château is unexpectedly famous. The seventeenth-century Château de Cerisy-la-Salle, in schist and granite, has since 1952 housed the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, which runs an internationally known programme of conferences — Barthes, Derrida and Heidegger all came here to think out loud. The park is open, and it lends a village of this size a peculiar and rather wonderful intellectual weight.

For everything else, Coutances is fifteen minutes: a cathedral city whose Gothic towers are visible across the whole plain, with a hospital, supermarkets, lycées, a railway station, a theatre and the Jardin des Plantes. Saint-Lô is a similar distance the other way, with the departmental hospital and the national stud.

For children, the west coast is the draw. The beaches at Agon-Coutainville, Hauteville and Gouville-sur-Mer — the last with its row of brightly painted fishermen's huts along the dunes — are twenty-five to thirty minutes, with sand yachting, surfing and the best oysters in Normandy. Granville and its port are around forty minutes, Mont-Saint-Michel about an hour, and Caen and Cherbourg and their ferry terminals roughly an hour and a quarter.