Brand new 2-bedroom bungalow on a 700 m² east-facing plot — Vouvant, Vendée

Seven hundred square metres with about twenty-two and a half metres of frontage, facing east, at Vouvant — and Vouvant is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France. Building land in a village carrying that label, at this price, is a genuinely unusual thing to find.

With a brand new two-bedroom bungalow on it, the total is €173,000.

The house is our two-bedroom bungalow: 75 m², everything on one level. A bright open-plan living, dining and kitchen area opens onto the terrace and garden, with two bedrooms, a modern bathroom, a separate WC and a utility room. A wide frontage on a plot this size gives real freedom in how the house sits, and on 700 m² there is room for a proper garden. The layout can be adapted to your wishes and a garage can be added as an option.

One point stated plainly: a septic system is needed, so an individual treatment system is designed and installed as part of the build. That is normal for a village plot of this kind, and the agency fees are already included in the land price shown.

About Vouvant

Vouvant is one of the loveliest villages in western France, and it knows exactly what it has. It stands on a spur inside a loop of the river Mère, walled, with a Romanesque church whose carved north portal is among the finest in Poitou, and the Tour Mélusine — the surviving keep of the old castle — rising above the rooftops.

The legend is the making of the place. Mélusine, the fairy who was a serpent from the waist down, is said to have built the tower in a single night, and to have flown from it shrieking when her husband discovered her secret. The story attaches to half the castles in the region, but Vouvant is where it belongs.

Below the village the river is dammed into a long wooded lake, and beyond it lies the forest of Mervent-Vouvant — five thousand hectares of oak and beech over a gorge, the largest forest in the Vendée, with walking, climbing, canoeing, a zoo and a hermit's cave cut into the rock.

The village has a bakery, shops, restaurants and a real community, with painters and craftsmen who have settled here over the years. Fontenay-le-Comte, a Ville d'Art et d'Histoire with a Renaissance quarter and a full range of services, is fifteen minutes.

The Marais Poitevin is half an hour south, Niort and its TGV to Paris around forty-five minutes, La Rochelle an hour and a quarter, and the Atlantic beaches about an hour.