Postcard from Provence. Saint Remy Vs Saint Tropez.

I have driven through Provence literally dozens of times. The A7 and A8 autoroutes are now so familiar I could write a decent guide-book to their service areas.

When we reach Provence, we usually we speed straight past the Luberon (to the left) and the Alpilles (to the right), and head directly to that little coastal bit called the Var and our normal home-from-home, Saint Tropez.

This year we did just the same on our way down, hurrying past Peter Mayle country to spend a paltry three nights in our favourite beach haunt. It's the shortest holiday visit I've ever made, and even after a wasp-ruined lunch at Le Club 55 we were still desperate to stay longer.

However, we had booked a house in the vrai Provence, somewhere between the Plateau de Vaucluse, the Petit Luberon and the Alpilles (the borders of these areas are somewhat blurred - especially by estate agents).

Having been priced out of anything worth owning in St Tropez, it seemed a good idea to find out what attracted so many second-home owners to the inland part of this vast and largely very rural region.

We've been here a week now, and I still haven't worked out what that attraction is.

Ok, so it's pretty warm in summer. But it can also be bloody windy (the mistral buffeting us today is rumoured to make people insane, so please excuse me if I become even more psychotic than usual).

There are some very pretty small hill towns like Bonnieux, Gordes and Menerbes (known as the 'golden triangle'). But these settlements are in many ways even less real than St Tropez. Life as you and I know it is almost extinct in these expensively preserved environments.

About the only thing you can buy in these villages is a postcard or a naff napkin. For anything to sustain normal life you need to battle for an early parking spot at crowded but wonderful morning markets, or traipse into towns like Cavaillon to a horrible hypermarket and pay about 50% more than you would in the UK.

You will hear from many that our own high streets aren't a patch on those in France, where small, high quality independent stores are still supposed to flourish. But here in Provence they've torn up the script and opted instead to turn almost every high street into a source of pointless tourist grot.

We spent almost an hour trying to find a food shop in L'Isle Sur La Sorgue one morning, and by the time we found a place to buy fruit and veg it had closed for lunch! Closed for lunch? Which century do these people live in? Next thing, they'll be closed on Sundays. Oh yes, sorry, they are.

Frankly, it would have been a lot easier to furnish a house with over-priced antiques than feed a hungry family.

Anyway, I digress, let's get back to property.

Close by is the phenomenon that is Saint Remy de Provence; a small town nestling at the base of the Alpilles, famous for providing Van Gogh with a lunatic asylum during the last year of his life and the setting for one of his most famous paintings - Starry Night.

Oh, and the whole town was once owned by Monaco's Grimaldi family (useless guide book info #1).

This otherwise fairly inconsequential town is surrounded by multi-million Euro second homes filled to the brim in summer with design conscious Parisians and is the spiritual home of France's most achingly stylish interiors magazine - Cote Sud.

A short walk from the brasserie where we ate dinner we found a cluster of estate agents that wouldn't look out of place on Sloane Street or Rue Faubourg St Honore. Sotheby's Realty, Michael Zingraff (Christie's), Emile Garcin, L'Agence des Alpilles, Janssens...to name but a few. These agents' windows were crammed with large country estates all done up like magazine spreads with box hedged gardens, pretend olive groves, polished cement floors and exposed stone walls. But why are they here? Why do people choose to holiday 75 kms inland, on a flat plain beneath some fairly plain hills (to call them mountains would be overly generous)?

The simple answer, it seems to me, is that people attract like-minded people. So, once one pretentious Parisian family set up camp just outside St Remy, others felt compelled to do likewise.

It's the same almost anywhere.

Back in the UK we've been looking at houses near Frome in Somerset. Not because we know or love the area, but because one or two people we admire and look up to have bought there...and this has started a wave of interest from like-minded London souls.

For all its artistic and cultural pretensions, St Remy still feels decidedly parochial compared to St Tropez. The traffic buzzes but, unlike its coastal counterpart, the town doesn't. Perhaps that's what people like about it.

Here they can play 'le grande poisson' in a much smaller pond. And still shop at Villebrequin for their swimmers.

This part of Provence is self-consciously interior designed. It may pretend to be relaxed and casual, but it isn't. Even in the ugly little crossroads town Coustellet, there's a shop selling Farrow & Ball paint.

St Tropez, on the other hand, is bohemian to its roots. It actually tries at times to be less relaxed, more formally designer led, and always fails. Brigitte Bardot's town lets its hair down on a daily basis, whereas out here in St Remy they seem to spend half their time in hairdressers (there are more of these than anything else on the high streets) having it put elaborately up.

A €3m bastide outside St Remy would cost closer to €10m in St Tropez. And I guess this is another, not inconsiderable, reason to choose the countryside over the seaside.

I think however that money and a wish to cluster together are only superficial reasons for St Remy's popularity among Parisians (and a few overseas buyers). The more fundamental reason is snobbery.

French snobs make our own breed look decidedly amateur. These masters of haute pomposity and the 16th Arrondisement are loathed throughout France in a way that Londoners cannot comprehend.

When the Parisians that do make it to St Tropez finally decamp for home in late August, the local waiters, barmen, beach honchos and hotel maids all celebrate. (I have never seen the old barman at Club 55 happier than the day after their mass departure.) They all prefer the courtesy, if nothing else, of the British, the Dutch and even the Germans.

The Parisian's snobbery and unpopularity accounts not just for their desire to holiday in clusters like St Remy, but also their decision to forego the pleasures of the coast.

Out here in this vast, rural, wind-blown fruit farm they can still pretend that they are THE rightful inhabitants of la France profonde (as they pompously call the culture and lifestyle of the countryside).

They have lost Gordes, Menerbes and Bonnieux to international Mayle followers, but St Remy still (just) remains theirs.

Outside the wind blows ever more angrily, as if it knows I am being mean about Provence. But I'm not really. There is much to recommend both St Remy and St Tropez.

But I know which one I would choose. And it has salt, not snobbery, in the air.

Stress, Strife and Stuttering Sales....the life of a Doer-Upper.

There was a time I rather liked stress.

Tight deadlines and unreasonable clients were a daily part of life in advertising, and in many ways I thrived on it.

These days, however, I find even the slightest pressure or the smallest set-back almost unbearably stressful.

Having two properties 'Under Offer' is close to life threatening on my personal stress-O-meter.

We have two 'legal' problems on the flat sale. And while the buyer is being patient and understanding at the moment I don't know how long that will last.

The issues are, frankly, so complex that I can't be bothered to explain. But the reality is that I didn't get all my ducks in line when it came to the post-renovation paperwork.

I could blame solicitors, builders or managing agents until I'm blue in the face (and about to have a heart attack), but the truth is I f****d up.

Yes, the buyer's solicitor is being a complete arse and her points are pointless (as the Managing Agents, Building Control consultants and my own solicitor all confirm).

But I should have anticipated this kind of rubbish from some box-ticking, power-crazed lawyer.

I hate red tape, regulations, rules and jumping through bureaucratic hoops, but I'm learning fast that lacking respect for these aspects of the property game can come back and bite you rather ferociously in the rear.

One way or another I guess we'll get through these issues, but whether there'll still be a buyer is questionable.

On our house, I have absolutely no clue what's happening. Last time I heard, the buyer's solicitor was waiting for the local searches and the client's deposit money.

It turned out our overseas cash buyer isn't actually a 'cash' buyer and needs to finance the deal! So when that deposit money will arrive is anyone's guess.

Nothing, it appears, ever quite runs as smoothly as it should. And it's the most I can do not to scream at some innocent party.

I'd hoped to get at least one property exchanged this week, before my stepson and business partner's wedding near Lyon this Saturday, but that now looks about as likely as Gareth Bale actually being worth €100m.

The Agent from Hell....or possibly Latvia.

A colleague of my stepson in Hong Kong arrived in town last week searching for a two bedroom investment flat.

Although an estate agent herself, she knows little about London and its myriad little property markets so I happily agreed to view a few apartments with her and show her round a few areas.

On our second viewing trip she was accompanied by two other Hong Kong Chinese ladies, both of whom might also be in the market for flats.

They were delightful clients; keen as mustard on London, tough as old boots when it comes to money.

This particular trip we were due to view four properties stretching from Lot's Road to Earl's Court, all with the same agency - a multi-office south west London specialist.

It was, from where I was standing, probably the most horrendous time I have ever spent with an estate agent.

To say she was off-hand, bullying and arrogant would be to let her off lightly. More importantly she was rude and incredibly unprofessional.

At two properties, she clearly hadn't made appointments with the owner/resident. But still she charged in, even brushing aside a man still getting dressed at one address (according to one of the clients).

Our agent was 'glamorous' in a way that reminded me of the girls/women who frequent Saint Tropez night clubs. Predatory is the only word that springs to mind. In this case, the prey is gullible overseas property buyers.

The first flat we viewed was clearly a developer product - done up to the nines, in other words. Nothing wrong with that, except that the client was looking for something with potential to improve.

When I mentioned this, the agent - who hadn't even bothered to introduce herself to me - turned on me and simply said, "It is a wonderful flat, perfect. Has it's own parking space. Look you can see it from here" marching off towards some minute balcony that would hardly sleep a cat let alone let you swing one.

"All interior furnishings are from Andrew Martin" she continued, as if a recently arrived visitor from Hong Kong should know this somewhat specialist store on Walton Street. If they did come from Andrew Martin (which is about 200 yards from where I live) then the developer successfully managed to buy the very few items of bad taste ever stocked there.

Her manner made Kirstie Alsopp seem like a pussy cat (what is it with me and cats today?).

Still, what did I care. I wasn't buying. Just observing.

The third property the client viewed with this agent happened to be in an Earl's Court street I know pretty well. I actually lived in it once.

"This flat is in the English Style " our agent shouted as she pointed at some distinctly French Style armchairs. I have no idea what she meant, it was all meaningless bluster anyway.

By now I was becoming extremely tired of the barrage of bullshit, the patronising treatment of the clients and the complete and utter disinterest in anything but her own views. These clients were clearly of no consequence to her.

I don't know about you, but I think I can spot local authority housing or flats rented out to council supported tenants. There are some fairly obvious tell tale signs such as the front doors all being the same colour (usually a rather horrible, drab colour), balconies and gardens that are dumping grounds for rubbish or unsightly washing lines etc.

Looking out of this almost £1m flat I noticed that the buildings opposite were run-down and clearly not 'owner-occupied'. There's a reason for this - they back onto the widest, noisiest section of the Cromwell Road.

Anyway, mentioning this quietly to my Hong Kong ladies, who had expressed an absolute dislike of anywhere that might have local authority housing nearby, I was verbally assaulted by the agent.

" You think you know everything. They are definitely not local authority. Prove it." Taken aback by this, I said " If you like, yes I can easily prove it. I may be wrong, but I don't think so."

"What do you know, " she said, " I mean, do you even live in London?"

Perhaps if she had taken 30 seconds of her no doubt invaluable time to ask who I was, what I did and why I was there...she might have known the answer to this. But of course she hadn't.

She clearly thought we had all 'just got off the boat".

At this point I made my excuses and left (as they used to say in the News of the World). I had something much more interesting to do in Shoreditch.


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For the record, no she wasn't from Foxtons. In fact on an earlier viewing spree we'd had a very helpful young negotiator from that much looked down upon agency....who took time to find out why I was there and was even grateful when I helped explain the good points of one of the flats she was showing. Indeed, while I know their reputation for being a bit 'fast' is probably true, I've never had anything but great service from Foxtons. So there.

The latest Ups and Downs of a Doer-Upper.

Having avoided the issue for some time with posts on Corfu, St Tropez and Planning, it's time to take stock of where we are with our own doer-upper properties.

The truth is, not much further on than we were 2 months ago.

Our first project in Egerton Gardens went on the market in May and still hasn't sold.

It all looked so good as we hit the market at a very 'toppy' asking price (toppy - agentspeak for outrageously silly price). But it seems that we, and more importantly our agents, may have overestimated just how much even this supposedly frenzied PCL market is prepared to pay for a studio flat.

I had hoped to sell before external works to the building cast a scaffolding shadow over the flat's main feature - a light filled room. But that hasn't happened. And we now face 10 weeks of less than ideal selling conditions.

Still, I say to myself, when it's finished the building will look fantastic (as it should, given the residents of this small property are paying Knight Frank £99k for the external refurb!).

The big decision we need to make is whether or not to withdraw the property from the market while this work takes place, and then re-launch in the early autumn. Perhaps with a new, or enlarged, set of agents.

I like both agents we are working with, but it took a threat to withdraw our property to get one of them to start communicating with us properly. And the other one hasn't quite lived up to its efficient, approachable, communicative image.

On the plus side, I'm still proud of the work we've done to the flat. It's a great space, and I feel sure that it will eventually sell at a very good price.

It's just irritating to still have our money tied up. I'd be much happier if we were out scouting our next project.

After much indecision, we actually turned down one offer as too low. We would still have made decent money on our investment, but I just didn't like the constant bid and counter bid situation.

Still, I absolutely hated saying no to close on a million.

Over in W8 our little end of terrace house still sits waiting for work to begin.

If the Royal Borough has anything to do with it, we'll be waiting for another few months yet.

The borough has introduced a 'scam' called the Pre-App. Basically you pay £440 to have a planning officer do what they used to do free - give you a quick, professional, but non-binding opinion on your plans.

This takes about a month. Add that to the two, three or four months to get through the planning stage proper and you're really looking at up to five months to get the council to agree that you can extend the back of your property. In our case, the extension we have applied for is a legal right under Permitted Development. (Technically we don't even have to ask for permission, but I'm advised we would be ill-advised to go this route.)

If you want a new basement or anything more complex, you're looking at six months or more. Sometimes a lot more. How does anything ever get done, I wonder? (I wish I had a monopoly on the supply of 'red tape'.)

Because I'm the most impatient person I know, we've resorted to seeing if we can sell the house now at a decent profit. The answer is, maybe.

We bought at a discount because there was only a short lease officially for sale, plus the potential to negotiate the purchase of the freehold from someone else. Not many, as I've said before, were prepared to take this risk. We did, and now we own the freehold it's a much easier 'sell'.

I haven't put it on the market, but asked one of Notting Hill's coolest, youngish agents (no names, no recriminations) whether they know anyone who'd pay enough to make it worth us selling.

Their enthusiasm, energy and optimism is infectious. I just hope it 'infects' the buyer they showed round sufficiently to unlock her bank account. We'll see.

Petty, Potty and Pointless. What the 'P' in planning really stands for.

I'm all for Planning, but not necessarily for planning.

With a capital 'P' it stands for 'the bigger picture'; the macro shape and structure of towns or neighbourhoods and conservation of the better parts of our heritage.

With a small 'p' it means petty, pointless and potty - small-minded, very conservative control on a micro level.

All too often, it seems to me, planning departments opt to focus on nit-picky irrelevant little things and lack the vision or the skills to look long term at our wider urban landscape.

Our little W8 house, for example, is going through the planning process as we speak. And it's a pretty soul destroying exercise for the architect.

Not one single interesting element of his ideas passed the so-called Pre-App stage (sounds like some historian's pre-ipad catch phrase).

It's an end of terrace, so we applied to put windows into the end wall. Several other ends of terrace in the same road already have windows. REJECTED.

The rear of the house faces the solid end wall of another terrace. So with nothing to look over, we applied for a raised ground floor terrace. REJECTED.

There is an existing small rear extension reaching up nearly to the full height of the building. To improve the usability of the internal floor-plate, we asked to increase its height by a mere 0.6m. REJECTED.

For some reason the planners wish to 'protect' the 'v' shaped roofs of our terrace from the evil that is mansard extensions....even though from the road you can't actually see the roof at all. NOT EVEN CONSIDERED.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

There is NO logic to any of this.

For example, I live in the same borough in a little terrace house that looks out onto the back of another row of terraced houses. Currently one house that backs onto our garden is being redeveloped. It has permission to build a raised ground floor terrace that looks directly into several houses and will be a serious invasion of our privacy. Explain, therefore, Mr/Mrs Planner, why, in the same borough, we can't have a terrace that looks directly over nobody! It's a bloody nonsense.

It seems to me that some of the best urban planning in central London is being driven not by the boroughs but by the large private estates like Grosvenor and Cadogan. Now, as readers of this blog will know, I'm no great fan of these estates and their managers, but at least they take a long view and try to enhance whole neighbourhoods (for their own gain, of course).

Just look at how Cadogan has transformed the area around Duke of York's Square, or the work Grosvenor has put into shaping the future of Mount Street in Mayfair, or how the de Walden estate (I think) has lead the rejuvenation of Marylebone High Street over several decades. These have all added to the quality of London life.

All the local boroughs seem to be interested in is a narrow-minded kind of conservation. Or, perversely, creating dangerous new road schemes like the ridiculous Exhibition Road revamp and the lethal road crossing outside Sloane Square tube.

The big estates (and I hate to say it, I really do) have done far more to retain the character, quality and elegance of our city than any borough.

In the case of our little W8 house, it is actually questionable whether houses like this should be left standing at all.

It was very badly and very cheaply built. It is, of course, in no way 'eco-friendly'. It was designed to serve a population happy to live in pokey rooms to cope with inefficient heating systems of old. It is completely unsuited to a 21st century resident. In fact, if you were being honest, the whole terrace of 5 houses should really be knocked down and make way for something more suitable.

But this is so politically incorrect I could probably get into trouble for even saying that.

In fact, there's only one 'P' that really sums up the attitude of planners: Pathetic.

Postcard from Corfu: Old money meets new Russians.

The last time I visited a Greek island they were still using their own currency, you couldn't flush loo paper, the food was indescribably awful and the barren, baked landscape of Crete seemed deeply uninviting.

This year, now that we are no longer tied to our own 'holiday home', we decided to return and give Corfu's fashionable north east coast a chance to redeem the country.

You still can't flush loo paper (surely this should be one of the criteria for EU entry) but the food was better than I remembered, the island is lush and beautiful and the Euro is at least a currency I sort of understand.

A 12 hour delay at Gatwick wasn't exactly the best way to start my first ever visit to Corfu.

We shared this nightmare with about 200 other passengers persuaded by CV Travel to fly on their charter service.

Choosing a tin-pot Lithuanian carrier for their flights was a very big mistake by supposedly up-market CV and its relatively new owner, Kuoni.

If the passenger manifest had been made up of average British holidaymakers, it would have been bad enough. But this was the poshest check-in queue I've ever seen.

The Boden kitted travellers on this non-flight to Greece probably cost more to educate than a fleet of new Boeings would cost to lease. And their alcohol fuelled anger as the hours clicked slowly by in the hell hole that is Gatwick South will have long term ramifications for CV.

Dinner parties all over West London will be regaled for months to come with horror stories of how we were treated, how badly informed we were and how we were eventually shipped out on a hardly airworthy decades old 737 with no markings and an eastern european crew of dubious quality. (Avoid at all costs any flight on the preposterously misnamed Grand Cru Airlines.)

It was an exhausting way to begin our short holiday. And I was seriously beginning to question our decision to discover what friends and family find so alluring about this particular Greek island.

Several people we know own houses and another has even moved here to become a high-end developer. All of them are based on the North East Coast between Corfu Town and Kassiopi. It's  where the Rothschilds famously own a compound (looks like a castle to me). This area is posh with a capital 'P'.

How it became a magnet for the 'well to do' is both obvious and baffling at the same time.

The craggy bays of the coastline are truly beautiful, the waters are crystal clear and the tavernas on each beach peddle cheap and largely edible food to accompany liberal quantities of even cheaper local wine.

But, and it's a big but for me, the beaches are pebble. There is no sand. None. The main town, Kassiopi, is awful - bad restaurants, cheap bars, naff shops. The food shops, where they exist at all, are universally terrible - only one sort of bread, for example. And there's a fundamental lack of quality about the place.

Greece is really a third-world country masquerading as an upwardly-mobile member of the EU. You sense this the moment you leave the faded grandeur of Corfu Town and follow the ramshackle strip development along the coast road. For the first 10km it's all run down tavernas, half built villas, tatty tourist shops, piled up rubbish left untouched, indecipherable and infrequent road signs.

I'm not sure whether this decay is due to the economic crisis or simply a trait of modern-day Greeks. I suspect the later.

Fortunately, after about 10km, the developments disappear and you start a switch-back ride along a spectacular coastline where the British have long dominated the property market.

If you bought a property here 20 years ago, you're probably very happy. If you bought more recently, things aren't looking so good..

Prices have gone only one way recently: down. Last year alone, prices dropped 12%.

By way of example, behind our rented beachfront house at Kaminaki I found a pink painted and completely refurbished old olive press for sale. Original asking price €1.3m. Now just €950k. And probably yours for any decent offer.

That's a big drop for a 2500 sq ft four bedroom house practically on the beach in a cute little bay where rental demand means you could probably get a gross annual return of 3%....and still have a holiday home available for 40 weeks of the year.

Just along the coast, however, a luxury development of three ultra-specified houses sold at ambitious asking prices to East european buyers (Moscow is only 3 hours away by private jet).

The future, it seems, isn't about the British buying up old stone houses for next to nothing. It's about minor oligarchs seeking luxury seaview homes that would cost five times as much in St Tropez or St Jean.

To avoid this influx of nouveaux riches I would focus on buying somewhere overlooking the bays of Agni or San Stefanos. Agni is home to perhaps the best taverna on the whole coast, Toula's. And Stefanos is so pretty even a ghastly place called the Wave Bar can't spoil it.

As much as we loved our week, and admired the homes of our friends, I won't be trawling the local agents' websites in search of a new holiday home in either of these bays

I like sand too much.

A St Tropez Buying Agent, Taxi Driver, Dinner Companion, Investment adviser,Therapist.......

With time to spare and a summer to plan, my thoughts invariably turn to Saint Tropez.

This corner of the Med has been our regular holiday destination for 15 years or so. And the place where we have bought and sold four homes.

As I'm sure you know, it's a bit of a Marmite town; people either love it or loathe it.

We're in the 'love it' camp for the following reasons.

Even though it attracts people from all over the world in vast numbers, it still feels (and is) small.

There are no high rise hotels or multi-national resort complexes, no Hyatts or Hiltons. And no huge apartment blocks to spoil the natural landscape of umbrella pines.

Even the world famous Pampelonne Beach has no permanent buildings to speak of along its 5kms of sand. (Just some of the most expensive to eat in wooden 'shacks' you'll ever come across.)

Teenagers adore the town for its nightlife and for the fact that their mates all turn up here at some point over summer. So they keep coming on holiday with you way past parents' natural sell by date.

Perhaps more than anything, it's the fact that 10 minutes from the bedlam of the famous quayside and its super yachts you can find yourself in rural France, surrounded on all sides by lush vineyards, wizened holm oaks and rutted, dusty tracks leading to hidden houses.

It's this contrast, so rigorously maintained by the planning departments of the three 'boroughs' that define the area - St Tropez, Gassin, Ramatuelle - that has kept the rich coming.

Up at the other end of the coast, this sense of being in another country disappeared soon after Scott Fitzgerald and friends. These days it's so over-built it's hard to know when you've left Antibes and arrived in Nice.

Of course, the 'Caps' of Antibes and St Jean are packed with wealth, but it's a different kind to that found in St Tropez.

It's like the difference between Knightsbridge and Notting Hill. One is sedate, formal, established. The other younger, edgier, less inhibited.

People go to St Tropez to party, to drink too much Domaine Ott, to wear T-shirt and shorts to dinner on the beach, to turn up the sound system, to spray Cristal over the crowds at Nikki, to strut their stuff at Club 55, to drive a mini-moke, to pretend they're living in the time of Brigitte Bardot and Gunther Sachs.

The rest of the year they're probably uber-bosses at Goldman's, billionaire hedge funders or geeky tech entrepreneurs. But, here, for a few weeks, they can let down what's left of their hair.

(On the weekend before resigning from NatWest, Stephen Hester was seen drowning his sorrows and offloading his bonus at Club 55. While on a nearby table, Rebecca and Charlie Brooks recovered from their recent court appearances with their friends.)

As well as owning several properties in the area (not at the same time, I might add), I have also 'played' at being a local buying agent.

I wouldn't say it was fun (or very remunerative) but I certainly got to know the area, understand the property topography and see lots of big houses by the sea.

Frustratingly, I realised that, unlike London's buying agents, we faced a significant problem: whereas most London buyers need to find a property, nobody actually needs a house in St Tropez.

It's a purchase that is pure self indulgence. So they are going to be very, very picky.

Over a couple of years our potential buyers fell into these categories:

1: The Property Tourist

We had a few of these. And they are very, very irritating.

I had one in particular, a UK based American, who just loved travelling the world looking at houses. One minute he seemed intent on buying in LA. The next it was the South of France. He actually lived in Hampstead.

This particular guy was pretty weird (and wired). He travelled on his own. Didn't drink. Didn't smoke. Didn't seem to like the sun or the beach. And he wore appalling dark winter clothes even in mid summer. I just couldn't work out what he saw in St Tropez.

Still he seemed to have plenty of money, and he just loved taking me to the town's most expensive restaurants.

In the end though it becomes tiresome eating rich food with an even richer self-obsessed weirdo.

His supposed budget ranged from €5m - €15m depending on the day of the week, and over a series of maybe four visits to the area we took him to about 20 different properties.

Some of these he feigned real interest in and would demand that we set up multiple viewings at various times of the day or night so he could see how the sun rose and set, how the stars shone at night, even how traffic noise varied dependent on the prevailing wind!

He didn't buy anything, and I don't think he ever expected to.  He was bored, probably friendless and this was one way to keep himself occupied and fawned over.

Eventually I rented him a house for a few weeks, and his whole family descended on the place. Typically, he somehow persuaded me to pick up some of his children and their friends from Toulon airport (at no charge). They were rude, ugly, tacky and saw me as some ex-pat chauffeur at their beck and call.

The client and his brood pretty much trashed the house, but complained endlessly about it and kept phoning me at ridiculous hours.

In the end, I just didn't answer the phone. I haven't heard from the guy since, thankfully.

2: The Impossible Dreamer

This person was a lawyer. Actually a very nice and rather clever lawyer. I liked him.

The problem was he wanted a house in an area where there are quite literally no houses. Bastide Blanche is a highly protected part of Ramatuelle where just a couple of vineyards, a few farmhouses and the odd crumbling shack share some of the most beautiful unspoilt beaches and hillsides along the whole coast.

Most people only visit it by boat to enjoy crystal clear shallows in untouched bays, but you can just about get there in a 4x4 if you are adventurous.

We call one of the beaches here 'the chitty, chitty, bang, bang beach' because it really was where a famous scene from this old movie was shot.

Anyway, we made it equally crystal clear (that's crystal, not Cristal - as in the house bubbly at Nikki Beach) that he could never have a house here. Ever.

In truth, his budget wasn't big enough to buy anything worth having close to St Tropez. So we took him to country houses at the back of Grimaud, up near La Garde Freinet or Plan de la Tour. Some would argue (me included) that these are actually classier areas, offering better value and nicer neighbours.

But when you want to live in Notting Hill, you don't tend to like the guy who says you can only afford Shepherd's Bush.

3: The Impetuous Buyer

The vast majority of houses in or around St Tropez were built between 1960 and 2000. Most of them to designs created by the same two architects.

So, unlike inland Provence, the chances of finding an old bastide or mas for sale are not disimilar to your chances of winning a Euro lottery rollover.

At one point, however, we were tipped off by a small estate agent that one such rare property was coming to the market.

It wasn't ideal, there was no view and it needed a great deal of renovation. But it was beautiful, had its own small vineyard and had once been the home of Ms Bardot's parents (how's that for St Tropez provenance).

With the largest top end agent on the Riviera about to launch it onto the market, we had only a day or two to do something.

Fortunately it's the kind of house a discerning UK buyer will wait years to find, and we found just such a buyer - a now well known London businessman.

He offered the full asking price on the basis of a couple of dodgy amateur photos and a chat with me.

"No," he said, " I don't need to see it, I just need to buy it. Now."

This was terrifying. He was about to commit €10m to the purchase and renovation on my bloody say so.

In the end we persuaded him to route his Courchevel bound private jet via Toulon so that he could pay a quick visit before going off to ski.

He bought it. And has never regretted it. After a massively expensive renovation, it's now one of the most beautiful houses I've ever visited in the area. Phew.

4: The Big Shot Buyer.

These aren't really buyers at all, they're predators.

Their day job usually involves finding opportunities to scalp their competitors. And they bring the same concept to finding a holiday home. They're looking for a seller with a 'margin call' he can't meet, an expensive divorce to pay for or a failing business they need to refinance. In other words, a 'distressed' sale.

It isn't really a holiday home they're looking for. In St Tropez, the right house is a power thing. It's a statement of wealth as potent as any Rich List, a summer HQ by a pool, a Gatsbyish entertaining opportunity and a less expensive new trophy than a change of wife.

I can't tell you too much about these ex-clients as they will quickly recognise themselves and get all lawyered-up (as the say in the jolly old US of A).

One of them however used to find it hilarious if he ever phoned while I was on a London bus. The idea that anyone he knew actually took 'a bus' was a new and profoundly amusing experience.

However rich these people were they weren't about to 'waste' any of it, though.

The guy looking to spend €25m on a house still negotiated a months rental down to the last €1000. The man who contemplated spending €1m to rent a house for 6 weeks still wanted it in the agreement that he wouldn't be liable for the electric light bill. And the 'impetuous buyer' still wanted a valuation almost monthly to be sure that his investment had been a good one.

The rich, as some wit once said, are different to you and I. But not that different. Even in St Tropez.



* Part 2 coming soon with 'where to buy' and 'who to know' in St Tropez.