Brand new 4-bedroom house with two bathrooms near the copper town — Villedieu-les-Poêles-Rouffigny, Manche

A compact 450 m² plot a mile and a half from the centre of Villedieu-les-Poêles, carrying a positive planning certificate, with a brand new four-bedroom house and two bathrooms on it for €209,000 all in.

The two-storey design is what makes a plot this size work for a family: four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garage without giving up the garden. Downstairs there is a bright open-plan living and dining room opening onto the terrace, a fitted kitchen, a bedroom with its own bathroom, a separate WC and a utility room. Three further bedrooms and a second bathroom are upstairs. The layout can be adapted to suit you.

The plot is advertised as unserviced and requiring individual drainage, so the connections and a treatment system are surveyed, designed and quoted as part of the works.

About Villedieu-les-Poêles

Of all the towns in this selection, Villedieu is the one with the strongest character — and for a family, the most to look at on a wet Sunday.

It has been making things out of metal for nine hundred years. The Knights Hospitaller of St John founded it in the twelfth century, and the copper trade grew up under their protection; the workshops still hand-beat copper pans and the Maison de la Poêlerie explains how. Better still, the Cornille-Havard foundry has been casting church bells here since 1865 and still casts them by hand in sand moulds. You can stand and watch a bell being made, and the bells from this workshop hang in Notre-Dame de Paris. Every fourth year the town holds the Grand Sacre, a procession that has run since the Middle Ages.

Practically, this is a well-equipped town: supermarkets, primary and secondary schooling, doctors, a hospital, a pharmacy, restaurants and a weekly market, with the granite courtyards and narrow cours of the old centre at its heart.

For days out, Granville and the sea are around twenty-five minutes, the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel about half an hour and the Mont itself around forty-five minutes. Coutances and Saint-Lô are each half an hour. Caen and its ferry terminal are roughly an hour and Cherbourg about an hour and a quarter.