These days, the jargon*** used in the ads actually means something to me, both the literal meaning of each term and its (often very different) implications.
The first ad needed no translation, however. It was a chambre de bonne with, if I was interpreting the photo correctly, a toilet beneath its only window, right next to the kitchen units—ideal for anyone with digestive troubles or who had recently escaped from prison, but not much else.
The next place was the complete opposite—three times the size of the live-in toilet but only twice the price, near but not too near République (a great métro junction for getting anywhere in Paris in minutes), very pretty, very well laid out. And, when I phoned, very sold, only two days after the ad had appeared.
Browsing further, I found five or six decent-looking apartments of various sizes, and rang up. Each time it was a mobile phone, and each time I had to tell the voicemail, ‘J’ai vu votre annonce dans le Particulier, et je voudrais visiter l’appartement.’
And although I had pronounced my phone number very clearly and didn’t sound at all like an estate agent trying to hassle the owner, only two people called back. The others, I guessed, must have sold already. Speed is of the essence.
Anyway, I finally got a bite, and one Saturday at ten in the morning, I stood outside a grey, middle-class nineteenth-century building near the Père Lachaise cemetery, and keyed in the door code I’d been given. I then keyed it in again. And again. I took a deep breath, tried one more time and phoned the owner to ask for the correct code. Voicemail, of course, but it didn’t matter because as I was about to leave a frantic message, a man came out and held the door open for me. Another deep breath, this time to smell the staircase. Pretty neutral—a good sign. No bizarre food smells, no medieval dampness, no stale cigarette smoke.
The ad had said sixième ascenseur, sixth floor with lift, but I didn’t fancy the look of the minuscule cabin that had been slotted down the middle of the staircase. I once read an article in a French paper about how often lifts break down and how difficult it is to call out the repair people at weekends. Two days standing in a matchbox? Non merci. I opted to go up on foot.
Six floors isn’t bad as long as you don’t expect to speak for ten minutes after your arrival at the top of the stairs, and I soon found myself hyperventilating comfortably in a low-ceilinged, but quite attractive, corridor. It had a varnished tiled floor, making it look as though it was made from large toffees, and a definite artist’s-garret feel, with the water pipes picked out in dark velvet red against the creamy white of the walls.
A ‘romantic garret’ in the 1940s. Today, in the Latin Quarter, this cupboard-sized apartment would cost about as much as a château in Auvergne—and be snapped up instantly.
The owner had told me sixième droite, sixth floor on the right, and although I could see three doors to my right, it was easy to spot which was the apartment for sale. The door was ajar and I could hear a loud voice dictating the address over the phone.
I knocked, noting that the lock was flimsy and would have to be replaced, and, getting no reply, pushed open the door to see a typically Parisian tableau—an open window with a body leaning half out into the street, a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other. The owner, a fifty-something man with longish grey hair and a leather jacket, beckoned me in as he carried on making a date for another viewing. Holding his cigarette even further outside, as if to offer a puff to the pigeons, he gestured at me to look around.
The place was listed as 18 square metres, so there wasn’t a whole lot to see. A room painted dirty white, with a cheap laminated table and fold-up chair against one wall (the apartment was being vendu meublé—sold furnished), a sofa smothered in a sort of chocolate-brown blanket cum tent in the other. Also a fake-pine chest of drawers with an Olympic-rings effect of mug stains and a few stubbed-out cigarette craters.
As I admired the furniture, the owner, still talking on the phone, made a dismissive gesture as if to say, All yours if you want them, you don’t even have to buy the apartment.
Wondering if I would ever get a personal interview, I went into the next room. Half its width was taken up with a pair of kitchen units, one of which had a much-used electric ring on top, the other a stainless-steel sink. Next to these, on the same wall, was a shower cubicle, with a plastic curtain that looked brand new, and a beige plastic concertina door behind which there was a sort of toilet. I say sort of toilet because it had a bowl and a cistern, but was squat and slightly square, as if it would have preferred to be a sink. It was sitting on a white box that was plugged into the wall. I wondered whether it wasn’t some kind of built-in sex toy—the vibrating toilet seat. It all looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if I hadn’t seen one in an old French film.
‘Bonjour!’ The owner came in behind me, apologizing for having been on the phone. He took my name, crossed me off a list and began to tell me, rather amicably, everything I already knew from the ad.
I interrupted him.
‘C’est un toilette, ça?’ I asked.
‘C’est un sani-broyeur,’ he said, and it all came flooding back—almost literally. When I first arrived in Paris, I spent a couple of weeks using one of these. Or rather, one week using it and another week waiting for a plumber to come and fix it. The sani-broyeur is a devilishly clever invention, and has allowed countless French apartment owners to stop using the shared loo on the staircase and install their own facilities, even when (and this is the key point) there is no regular-sized toilet downpipe within range. These machines can be plumbed in to a normal water outflow pipe, hence the broyeur (grinder) part of their name.
Instinctively I reached out and flushed, always a good thing to do when visiting an apartment. A toilet that doesn’t work is a good indicator that things might not be so well maintained elsewhere.
The sani-broyeur sucked away the water in the bowl, and then did its grinding.
‘You can get really silent ones now,’ the owner said, waving his telephone perilously close to the bowl.
I honestly didn’t want to know.
“Why are you selling?’ I asked. Again, a key question. If the owner looks cagey, there could be trouble afoot. A messy divorce or inheritance dispute between rowing siblings can sink a sale.
“We’re retiring to the campagne’, he said. ‘I’m selling everything.’ He looked too young to be opting out of work, but this was France and he was of the generation that had it good. If he’d worked since leaving school, he could get a full pension. Selling off his Paris property and moving to the résidence secondaire would allow him to grow old very comfortably.
Meanwhile, something else had just occurred to me. I went back and stood in the doorway to the other room. The apartment had seemed big for 18 square metres, and now it hit me.
‘Where’s the bed?’ I asked.
‘C’est un clic-clac,’ he said, meaning a fold-out bed.
Of course. And there was no wardrobe, either, or nook to hang a clothes rail. To be liveable, the room would need filling with furniture. The place wasn’t furnished as much as half-furnished.
The owner’s phone started ringing, and with a quick excusez-moi, he took the call and began to confirm that the place hadn’t been sold yet and oui, the caller could come and visit straight away.
I gestured as if to say I had to go. The owner smiled and nodded goodbye—he could tell I wasn’t interested, but he knew that someone else would be.
‘Non, non—un sani-broyeur,’ he was saying, ‘like all the studios on this floor. There’s never been a problem.’
I was already halfway to the stairs.
An apartment ‘under the roof’
My next visit was very different, mainly because the apartment was extremely tempting, and if I’d had the money (and the need for a pied-à-terre, of course) I’d have snapped it up.
It was in the 19th, above Belleville. Not exactly in the centre of town, but an area that is becoming trendier by the day, while keeping most of its traditiona
l shops. The ad was for a grand studio in a courtyard, ‘under the roof (that’s where all apartments are, you hope, but top-floor places are often advertised using this evocative image of living amongst the roof beams), with a mezzanine, which can allow you to split a studio into two rooms.
I inquired when the owner would be holding viewings and she said, ‘All Saturday starting from nine.’
At nine on the dot I was there, but I wasn’t the first. In the courtyard—more of a lane than a mere courtyard—there was a middle-aged man taking photos with an iPhone. I went into the bâtiment de droite, nodding appreciatively at the note by the door apologizing to neighbours for wedging it open—a good atmosphere in the building, it seemed.
The stairs were bare wood but not in a neglected way, and the stairwell was graffiti-free (there is zero tolerance in any decent Parisian building). Just like my favourite restaurants, it wasn’t chic but it didn’t need to be.
Pushing open the door (which had a nicely solid lock), the first thing I saw was a woman of about sixty being interviewed by a small thirty-something man who was taking careful notes on his copy of the Particulier.
‘Et les charges, c’est par mois ou par trimestre?’ he asked. (Were the building charges per month or quarter?)
‘Par trimestre,’ she answered and he tried not to look relieved.
I said bonjour, wiped my feet and stepped forward, and the lady waved her arms as if to shoo me further in. She had a bemused but happy look on her face like an artist whose work has unexpectedly become fashionable, and now everyone wants to visit her studio. On the table by her side, there was a blank compromis de vente—a sale agreement. She was obviously willing to sign that very morning.
The apartment was everything the ad had promised—simple, blemish-free white walls and a ceiling with no signs that someone had been filling in cracks overnight. An open kitchen-dining area, a living room complete with a sofa, an armchair, an old dresser and TV corner, a double bed up on the mezzanine, and—holy of holies for a studio—a real toilet. The bathroom seemed to have a young couple living in it, but they turned out to be viewers who were squatting on the edge of the bath (yes, it even had a bathtub) discussing whether to put in a bid, and looked nervously up at me as though they were afraid I’d heard their maximum price.
There was a radio playing classical music, so I gestured to the owner (who was still being interviewed) whether it was OK to turn it off. A radio can cover up annoying sounds like a humming air-conditioning unit or a nearby clothes workshop—Paris still has lots of sweatshops with buzzing sewing machines. I listened, opened the window and stuck my head out, listened again, and heard only the distant traffic noise. Excellent sign for a Saturday morning.
Satisfied, I went to hover by the owner and the man taking notes for her biography.
‘C’est la première semaine?’ he was asking—was it the first week it had been in the paper?
‘Oui,’ the owner said. I didn’t think she’d need a second.
The interviewer nodded, and told me to go ahead with my question—for him, it was thinking time.
I started my own interrogation, hitting the seller with all the essential questions—charges, approximate electricity and gas bills, the date of the last réunion de copropriété (owners’ meeting), when the next ravalement (expensive façade clean-up) was due, whether the toit (roof) was en bon état (good condition—obviously she was going to say yes, but it’s worth asking to see the reaction), whether the building was planning any other communally paid work such as a renovation of the courtyard, and, apologizing for being indiscreet, why she was selling. Again, no one is ever going to say, ‘Because the neighbours hold all-night bongo and firework parties and breed cockroaches which they feed to their pet baboons,’ but it’s always interesting to ask.
‘I retire in three months, so I won’t be coming to Paris any more,’ she said.
‘So this is your pied-à-terre?’
‘Yes, I come here for one or two weeks a month. And my husband joins me now and again, of course. I’ll be sad to sell after fifteen years, but the children have places of their own, and we can’t justify the expense.’
All in all, it was the equivalent of the car with one careful owner.
‘Er, Madame …’ The couple from the bathroom were looking even more nervous. Time to put in a bid, it seemed. I didn’t blame them. The apartment was sensibly priced, excellently located, and had a great feel to it. Lived-in, but by someone who loved the place.
‘Go ahead,’ I told them, and they closed in.
Out on the landing, the guy who’d been conducting his interview was on the phone, and seemed to be telling his girlfriend that she ought to have come with him because he was sure the apartment was going to sell.
Going downstairs, I met the man I’d seen in the courtyard. An investor, I decided, looking to buy to rent. The polite thing to do would have been to wait on the landing and allow him to pass, but I pretended not to have seen him and clattered halfway down the flight of stairs between the second and first floors.
‘Oh, désolé,’ I apologized, and turned as if to go back up.
‘Non, non, je vous en prie.’ He beckoned me to come past, not managing very well to hide the fact that he thought I was being impolite.
‘Non, j’insiste.’ I turned, walked back up the stairs and gestured him through. As he passed, thanking me, I told him, ‘The apartment doesn’t interest me, anyway.’
‘Non?’ He looked intrigued.
‘Non,’ I said, not wishing to elaborate, but with the slightly pained look on my face that is achieved by picturing a sani-broyeur. ‘Bonne visite,’ I wished him, and went on my way.
With any luck, I’d wasted enough of his time, and instilled enough doubt in his mind, to let the young couple seal the deal.
Taking the plunge
This chapter doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive housebuyers’ guide, so I won’t even try to go into all the legal niceties of property deals. But the most reassuring thing about buying in France is that a deal is a deal. Buyer and seller sign the compromis de vente (pre-sale agreement), with no lawyers present, and the seller then has seven days in which to panic and retract, without incurring any penalties. Once those seven days are up, the buyer has to pay 10 per cent of the sale price to the seller’s solicitor (notaire) as a deposit, then usually has three months or so to put together the finances and find their own solicitor to oversee the transaction.
Buyers can pull out and get their deposit back if the bank refuses a loan or if the obligatory checks (for asbestos, termites, lead paint, etc.) aren’t satisfactory, but they are in no danger of being gazumped.
This protection explains why apartments sell so fast. If you visit an apartment that has been advertised in the Particulier, you have to go along with ink in your pen and the courage to sign there and then. And you have to phone up the instant you see the ad. Even an hour’s hesitation can lose you the deal. Owners selling direct usually want a quick, clean sale at the asking price, so that they don’t have to repeat the trauma of having their apartment invaded by hordes of people demanding to know how well their toilet works. And if they haven’t overpriced their property, they will find a buyer, and fast. If you aren’t willing to act quickly, it’s probably better to go to a slower-moving agent.
For people who are trying to get a feel for what’s on the market, just doing a few prospecting visits can therefore be useful, and highly revealing. I was once shown around an apartment by a man who looked like a strait-laced French physics teacher, but who was arm in arm with a young Asian ladyboy He seemed to be selling his lifestyle more than his apartment.
I fled another place because the people trying to sell it were an estranged couple who couldn’t even stand to look at each other, let alone negotiate a deal. I could almost hear their lawyers arguing about prices and dates above the echoing silence of their dead relationship.
On the other hand, I bought an apartment from an old shopkeeper who was com
plaining that the Marais was turning too trendy, and that traditional shops like his vacuum-cleaner store would soon be going out of business. He couldn’t wait to leave, and the price came tumbling down.
The moral of the story is that even if the apartments you visit are awful, at least you will have learnt something about Paris and how its citizens live. Not that I’d recommend viewing property as a tourist activity, of course. That would be too cruel to my fellow Parisians …
* This title is a shameless French property pun—la location means rental (location would be la situation). The joke is in totally the wrong place, because this chapter is about buying not renting, but it’s just more proof that in France puns crop up at the most inappropriate times.
** For an only slightly exaggerated account of that debacle, readers might like to look at the ‘Octobre’ chapter in A Year in the Merde.
*** For a full, translated list of the French vocabulary used in property ads, see the Scrapbook section of my website, www.stephenclarkewriter.com.
APPENDIX 1
ADDRESSES
VOILÀ THE ADDRESSES, PHONE numbers, websites, emails, etc.—les coordonnées as the Parisians would neatly say—of the cafés, restaurants, museums and other places of interest recommended in the book, chapter by chapter. If places occur in more than one chapter, they are listed at the first occurrence, unless they’re so important that they need mentioning more than once. If I give the address or location in the main body of the text, I haven’t listed it again here. And if I’ve missed any out, they’re on the internet.
Opening times and prices may have changed since I did the research for the book, so please check before going, to avoid disappointment and/or bankruptcy.
And please remember that, as I said in the chapters concerned, some of these places have been recommended not because they are centres of excellence but because they’re interesting from a sociological viewpoint. If you get ripped off, insulted or just plain disappointed there, please just put it down as a valid Parisian experience.
Paris Revealed Page 25
