A holiday haven in the South of France

Ever dream of living a life you've seen on the big screen? A Year in Provence? Under the Tuscan Sun? Well, the life that four Canadian women have carved out for themselves in the south of France is definitely fodder for filmmakers.

In 2004, Mary-Anne Swire, Brenda Innes, Carol Panczyk and Nancy Evans—who've been friends and travel companions for years—bought a rundown stone house in a picturesque ancient village and turned it into the vacation getaway of their dreams ... and mine, and probably yours, too.

It started when Nancy and her husband visited friends who'd moved to the Languedoc, a sunny wine-producing province of France. Upon returning to London, Ontario, where she and Carol run an interior design business, Nancy convinced her three travel pals to return to France with her. "We all fell in love with the Languedoc and the lifestyle," says Nancy. "We thought, wouldn't it be great to own a property here?"

A few years—and trips to Languedoc—later, on Christmas Eve 2003, Nancy's phone rang. It was her friends in France. "They said, 'We've seen a house and it's so perfect that if you don't buy it, we will.'" With implicit trust in their friends, the women snapped it up—sight unseen except for a few pictures of the rather tired-looking building. "By then the whole idea had become more concrete," says Nancy. "It wasn't so frightening, and it was a shared risk we all agreed to."

And luckily, the work needed to refurbish the place would also be shared. When Nancy and Mary-Anne arrived the following March, what they saw was not for the faint of heart. "The house was a dump," states Nancy. "It was a warren of little rooms, the garage had been added in the '50s, there were weeds up to our waists."

But they also catalogued its innumerable plusses: it was detached (unlike most of the village houses), within the protected historic district of the village's 12th-century château, it had a sunny southern exposure and, by village standards, a huge garden.

Inside, though, it had to be gutted. And the demolition team? A rotating crew of the four friends, plus husbands, burly sons and even daughters' boyfriends. To complete the work, the women hired an ex-pat British contractor who worked tirelessly with the local tradesmen. "Every-one in town was related to an electrician or a plumber or a painter who worked on our place, so it became a bit of a community project," says Nancy fondly.

To coordinate everyone's efforts, she and Carol created a book dubbed "the bible" that sketched out the whole plan: which walls to take down, where to run electrical and plumbing, it even had pictures of new fixtures and cabinetry. Every two or three months one of the women would fly over and check on the progress. "With e-mail, faxes and phones, it's not too, too difficult," says Nancy.