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We are Sue and Steve Chittenden, formerly from North Devon. Sue was a diagnostic radiographer, Steve was a production engineer turned shopkeeper. We bought our first property in France for a holiday home in the nineteen - eighties, and well prepared by that experience, bought the old farm at Bodrefaux in 1999 and moved here permanently with our daughter Hannah in February 2000, while our son Ben was at university in Britain. We started letting our gites in 2001 Like many others since, we came to France for a gentler and less hurried pace of life, to work together, and to see each other for longer than a few hours in the evening each day. Property prices in France enabled us to buy and convert a suitable property to gites here and the climate in this part of Brittany meant that we would have a good "product" to offer. Having worked in Switzerland Sue was fluent in French and having had lasting friendships with our Swiss friends, our holiday home neighbours and our son's French exchange families, Steve could manage too. Ben passed french at a-level although he stayed in Britain after graduating. He lives in Newport Pagnell with his girlfriend Bex. Living in a hamlet of ten diverse French families and four French owned holiday homes, we have had births, marriages and deaths at close hand over the past nine years and we've coo'ed over the new arrivals, raised a glass to the newlyweds, and sat beside the departed ones. Our daughter progressed with the other children from the hamlet at the village primary school to secondary and then through lycee to gain her social economics baccalaureate. She's just started a degree course at a university in England. We number retirees, factory workers, farmers, mechanics, civil servants, a biochemist, a teacher, a mason, a gendarme, and their families, among our friends and neighbours. Our gites have proved very successful despite many others becoming available. 30-40% of our guests have stayed with us before - many several times, and much of each summer is booked twelve months in advance. We think that this is due to our location (many British owned gites are isolated miles inland), the quality of the gites themselves and the garden, cleanliness, and the warmth of our welcome. Many of our guests have become friends and we look forward to chatting with them about the ups and downs of the year gone by over a glass of wine. Despite the hard work that makes our gite business successful, it's a very pleasurable way to earn a living
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