Brand new 4 to 5 bedroom house 400 m from the beach — Saint-Malo, Rothéneuf

Four hundred metres from the Plage du Val and three hundred from the shops, at Rothéneuf. The plot is 419 m², serviced, with free choice of builder and the soil study already completed — everything cleared out of the way before you start.

That combination of distances is the point. Walk to the beach in five minutes, walk to the bakery in three, and still have a garden and a garage. On this coast that is what people are actually looking for, and it is what almost never comes up as building land.

The house is our 150 m² design of four to five bedrooms, with two bathrooms and a garage.

About Rothéneuf

Rothéneuf is the eastern end of Saint-Malo, and it feels different from the rest of it — a village that the city grew out to meet rather than a suburb. It has its own centre, its own shops, its own church and its own small harbour, and a string of beaches that are quieter than the Sillon: the Val, Le Havre, Le Pont.

Its oddity is famous. In the late nineteenth century a deaf-mute priest, the Abbé Fouré, spent twenty-five years carving the granite of the foreshore into hundreds of figures — a whole legend of pirates and monsters cut into the rocks above the sea. The Rochers Sculptés are still there, and there is nothing else like them in France.

The coast path runs east from here towards the Pointe du Meinga and on to Cancale, past some of the least developed shoreline near the city, and the bay fills and empties beneath it on tides of around thirteen metres — among the greatest in Europe.

The centre of Saint-Malo is ten minutes: the walled city, the hospital, the schools, the market. Cancale and its oyster beds are fifteen minutes east. The ferry port and the TGV station are both in the town — Portsmouth, Poole via Guernsey, Jersey, and Paris in under three hours.