Charente (16) · Charente-Maritime (17) · Deux-Sèvres (79) · Vienne (86)
Long low farmhouses, walled courtyards and more outbuildings than anyone needs. Gentler ground than the Dordogne, and a different set of loading problems.
The classic Charentais property is a longère — a single-storey range, sometimes a hundred feet of it, with rooms running one into the next off a central corridor or straight off the courtyard. The good news is that almost everything is on the ground floor. The awkward news is the distance: a carry from the vehicle to the far bedroom can be the length of the building, and doing it repeatedly in the heat of a Charentais summer is what actually determines how long a day takes.
Courtyard groups are the other signature. A house, a barn, a former stable and a bread oven arranged around a cour, usually entered through a single porte cochère with a stone arch over it. That arch is the constraint on the whole job. We measure its height and width before anything else, because a vehicle that cannot pass it turns the courtyard into a hand-carry.
Owners here tend to use the outbuildings as storage, and a decade of that accumulates. On a return move the barn is frequently a bigger job than the house — workshop tooling, garden machinery, salvaged shutters kept for a project that never happened. We inventory the outbuildings separately so nothing is discovered on loading day.
Access
The approach decides more of the day than the contents do. These are the three that recur here.
Courtyard entrances are stone, load-bearing, and lower than they look. Height and width are measured at survey and the vehicle chosen to suit; where nothing fits, we plan the hand-carry distance into the crew size instead of pretending it will be quick.
A longère can put fifty metres between the tail-lift and the far room. We crew for the carry, not the cubic metres, and stage the load so heavy items land nearest their destination.
Barns, stables and former chais are surveyed as separate spaces with their own inventory. Fuel, chemicals and gas bottles are identified early because they cannot travel with household goods.
Out to France
This is the region people buy when the Dordogne has priced them out, and the outbound moves reflect it — younger owners, more full-house relocations, more of them working remotely and bringing office equipment and workshop tooling that needs its own handling plan rather than being treated as boxes.
Collecting from London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol and across the UK — removals from London to the Charente & Poitou, and from every other postcode besides.
Moving to FranceBack to Britain
Return moves from the Charente are frequently downsizes. A couple leaving a longère and two barns for a UK bungalow cannot take it all, so the job becomes three jobs: what ships, what is sold locally, what is cleared. We scope all three at survey so the decisions are made calmly rather than on the morning.
Delivering to a UK address, into store, or split across both while a purchase completes.
The return legElsewhere in France
Tell us the commune, the kind of building and which direction you are going. We will come back with what we need to see.