Britain → France · France → Britain
We move households between Britain and France, and we plan the job around the building rather than the mileage. Stone houses with deep reveals, village properties four storeys tall, farmhouses at the end of a track, chalets above a hairpin — and the return leg, which most removers treat as an afterthought.
Collecting and delivering across London · Manchester · Birmingham · Leeds · Glasgow · Edinburgh · Bristol
The dossier
Cubic metres tell you how big a vehicle to send. They tell you nothing about whether the contents will go into the building at the other end. These four do.
Width, height and reveal depth at the tightest point on the route — not at the front door.
Stair width, landing turn, headroom under the beam. What comes apart and what goes through a window.
Lane width, gradient, surface, turning space and any arch. Where the vehicle stops if it cannot commit.
House and outbuildings counted separately. The barn is a job in its own right and always has been.
Where the properties are
Grouped by what British owners actually buy there, not by administrative boundary — because the building is what decides how a move is crewed.
Dordogne (24) · Lot (46) · Lot-et-Garonne (47)
Stone, oak and a lane too narrow for the lorry.
Charente (16) · Charente-Maritime (17) · Deux-Sèvres (79) · Vienne (86)
A hundred feet of house and one stone arch to get through.
Hérault (34) · Aude (11) · Gard (30) · Tarn (81)
Four floors up, one room wide, and no lift.
Gers (32) · Landes (40) · Hautes-Pyrénées (65) · Tarn-et-Garonne (82)
A kilometre of track and nobody to hold the gate.
Haute-Savoie (74) · Savoie (73) · Isère (38)
Top-floor living, ground-floor door, and a hairpin in between.
The other direction
Going out, you filled a house. Coming back, you have to take it apart — and usually against a completion date that will not shift. A return move is three jobs running at once: a shipment, a local sale, and a clearance.
We scope all three at survey and give you three inventories instead of one. We will also tell you plainly which French pieces will not suit the house you are moving into, before they are packed rather than after they have arrived.
How the return leg worksWhat ships, what sells locally, what is cleared. Decided calmly at survey, not on the morning.
The declaration prepared properly, with the evidence assembled while you are still in the French house.
French completion and UK purchase rarely line up. Storage on either side closes the gap without drama.
Part to the new house, part to a relative, part into store — packed and labelled to the split.
By property, not by mileage
A full house in a four-storey village property and a full house in a Gascon farmhouse share a cubic volume and nothing else. We quote on the building.
maison de maître, longère, grange
Thick walls, narrow openings, original staircases and outbuildings holding more than anyone remembers putting there.
The catch — The constraint is never the front door. It is the reveal behind it, the turn at the top of the stair, or the beam across the barn opening — and none of those show up on a floor plan or a video walk-round.
maison de village, maison de ville
Tall, narrow, stacked up a hillside, with a stone stair that turns at every landing and a roof terrace at the top.
The catch — Everything is vertical and the street is too narrow to park on. A piece that came in before the previous owner blocked the stairwell with a new banister is not coming out the same way.
appartement, immeuble haussmannien
Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes — building rules, small lifts and a syndic who needs telling.
The catch — The building has more say in the move than you do. Lift dimensions, permitted hours, the courtyard gate, and a syndic de copropriété whose consent is not automatic.
chalet, résidence secondaire
Alpine chalets, coastal apartments and the holiday house that is turning into the main one.
The catch — Access is seasonal and the property is rarely empty. Resort restrictions, rental commitments and a garage full of kit nobody counted make these moves a scheduling problem as much as a handling one.
retour au Royaume-Uni
Return legFrance to Britain — the leg most removers treat as an afterthought, and the one that needs the most planning.
The catch — A house lived in for twenty years is not a house-move. It is a clearance, a sale, a shipment and a set of customs formalities running at once, usually under a completion date that will not shift.
Field notes
These are the six things that turn a straightforward French move into a bad day. None of them is exotic. All of them are avoidable at survey.
Hamlet lanes with stone walls on both sides and no passing place. We find the last hard standing, stage there, and shuttle down in a smaller unit. Planned, it is a routine part of the day. Discovered, it is the day.
A porte cochère narrows as it rises, so an opening measured at the crown lies to you. We measure at the spring of the arch as well, and where nothing fits we crew for the hand-carry instead of hoping.
Most communes will grant a temporary parking authorisation to hold kerb space. Practice varies by mairie. We establish what yours actually wants and deal with the office, in French.
Outbuildings are under-counted every single time, and they hold the items with the most handling restrictions — tooling, machinery, fuel, gas. We survey them as separate spaces with their own inventory.
A chemin rural that carries a loaded vehicle in high summer may not after the autumn rain. Where that risk is live we plan the transfer point in advance rather than testing it with a full load on board.
The commonest reason a piece arrives in France and has to leave again. Send us the tightest dimension at the destination and every item gets checked against it before it is loaded.
How it runs
We do not give a figure off a video call and a room count. It is the quickest way to win a job and the quickest way to have an argument on loading morning.
Start with the propertyNot just the volume. What kind of property, where it sits, how you get to it, and which direction you are going. The quote form takes the details; the notes field is where the useful information lives.
In person where we can, and from measured dimensions and specific photographs where a visit is not practical. We will tell you exactly what to measure. Both ends, always — origin alone tells us half a story.
What is moving, what comes apart, where the vehicle stops, what the access arrangements are, what is happening at the far end, and what the cover is. Written down, so it can be checked rather than remembered.
You know when the vehicle loads, when it crosses and when it is due. Where customs formalities apply, we handle the declaration. Where the dates do not meet, the load goes into store rather than into a compromise.
Both directions
Two other firms quoted off a video call. Yours was the only one that asked for the width of the turn at the top of our stairs. Three things came apart and went back together and nothing touched the banister.
We had been in the Dordogne twenty-six years and I genuinely did not know what was in the barn. They went through it with me over a morning, made three lists, and stuck to them. The clearance side was handled as carefully as the shipping.
Told us straight that the armoire would not stand up in the new bungalow. Measured it, showed us, and we sold it locally for a fair price instead of paying to ship it and then paying to get rid of it. That conversation saved us more than the whole quote.
The track up to the house is about a kilometre and it had rained all week. They had already planned for it — transferred at the top and shuttled down in a smaller van. Nobody made a fuss about it, it was just what was happening.
Sorted the parking permit with the mairie for us. In French. We had spent a fortnight failing to do that ourselves.
The sale in Savoie completed a month before we got the keys in Yorkshire, which we had been dreading. They loaded on the day the notaire needed, stored it, and delivered when we were ready. Calm, the whole way through.
Both ends, always. The French property is usually where the difficulty is, and surveying only the origin tells us what is moving without telling us whether it will go in when it gets there.
Where a physical visit to the French end is not practical before the move, we work from measured dimensions and photographs of the specific points that matter — the tightest doorway, the stair turn, the landing, the approach. We will tell you exactly what to measure and photograph.
That is a common outcome rather than a failure, and the answer is planned rather than improvised. We identify a hard-standing transfer point as close as the approach allows and shuttle the load in a smaller vehicle.
The important thing is that this is decided at survey. A shuttle that is planned is a routine part of the day; a shuttle that is discovered at the end of a lane is not.
That is half of what we do, and it is the reason this firm exists in the shape it does. The return leg is routinely treated as an afterthought by removers who are set up to go one way, and it is the harder of the two.
A return move is a clearance, a local sale and a shipment running at once, usually against a completion date that will not move. We scope all three at survey.
Often yes, sometimes emphatically not, and we would rather say so before it is packed. French case furniture is built for rooms with height — an armoire sized for a longère frequently will not stand upright in a UK house.
Give us the dimensions of the property you are moving into and we will check the large pieces against it. Paying to ship something that then has to be sold at the other end is the most avoidable expense in a return move.
Which property, which direction, and what is in the barn. We will come back with what we need to see and how we would run it.