Brand new 4 to 5 bedroom house on a corner plot with soil study done — Saint-Malo, Clos Cadot

A corner plot between two streets at Clos Cadot, with two things already settled that normally hold a build up: the geotechnical study is completed, and the permitted building footprint is half the plot. On 260 m², that is a generous allowance, and a corner position gives light on two aspects and a choice of where to put the entrance.

The house is our 150 m² design of four to five bedrooms, with two bathrooms and a garage. With half the plot buildable and a two-storey design, this is a house that lives much larger than the land suggests.

The completed soil study is worth more than it sounds: it is a required part of the CCMI process, it determines the foundation design, and having it done means one less unknown between you and a fixed price.

About Clos Cadot and living in Saint-Malo

This is a town plot in a real town. Saint-Malo has around 47,000 residents, a hospital, schools at every level, a university campus, supermarkets, a cinema, theatres and a covered market, and it stays open through the winter — which is not true of the prettier, smaller places along this coast.

What you are paying for here is the address, and it earns it. The walled city is one of the great set pieces of French architecture, and almost none of it is original: eighty per cent was destroyed in August 1944 and rebuilt between 1948 and 1960 in the same granite, the same proportions, the same street lines. Walk the ramparts on a rising tide and the forts turn back into islands one by one.

The beaches run all along the commune — the Sillon for nearly three kilometres, Bon-Secours with its tidal pool and its diving board, the Éventail under the Fort National. Cancale and its oysters are fifteen minutes; Dinard across the estuary; Dinan half an hour; Mont-Saint-Michel fifty minutes.

The ferry port and the station are both in the town: Portsmouth, Poole via Guernsey, Jersey most days, and a direct TGV to Paris in under three hours.