France Day Three - Maison Juliette

We are renting the most lovely 150-year-old house in Carcassonne for the week.  Found on www.vrbo.com, Maison Juliette is 3,000 square feet of light and luxury.  From the street, it is a large, unassuming looking house.  Inside, however, it's a whole different story.  I do not know the history of the house, but it has a feel of peacefulness about it...very calm and quiet.  Although it's in the centre ville, no noise can be heard from the inside.  We have a walled courtyard in the back, where we've spent a lot of time sitting and drinking wine.  In fact, I'm writing this from the table on the patio. The house has four large bedrooms, four baths, and eight fireplaces. There is a nicely remodeled kitchen, a formal dining room, a summer kitchen which opens to the patio, and two sitting rooms.  All of the rooms have fourteen-foot ceilings with original moldings. The sitting rooms are separated from the rest of downstairs by a long front to back hallway, which has incredible tiled floors.  At the end of the hallway are a set of double doors which lead outside.  All of the windows, as well as the back door, have deep green shutters. The house is three stories tall, including a full basement and an unfinished top floor.  The top floor was, in the past, used as a drying room for clothing, and the clotheslines are still hanging from the exposed beams.

Here's the kitchen:

 

 

This is the summer kitchen, which has an impressive fireplace for cooking, and John is delighted that it has a "beer fridge!"

This is the dining room:

 

This is the sitting room where we've been hanging out in the evening.

And this is the other one, which has a television for watching French shows!

Here's the downstairs hallway, from back to front:

The back of the house:

The staircase to the second floor:

The upstairs hallway:

And three of the bedrooms:

I feel like a person from House Hunter's International!  Two couples from California are the owners of this house, and we're very impressed it.  Not sure if there was an entire makeover or not, but I do know it takes a lot to keep a house like this one up and running, and to maintain its charm.  The owners have a local handyman and his wife, who meet and greet and go over everything with the renters, plus a housekeeper to keep everything in good shape. We are most appreciative of the opportunity to stay here; it's a dream home.