CJ and Jim Brough realised that they didn’t have to put up with the stresses and strains of life in London; they could work just as easily from France and have a better life to boot. Words Anna Tobin
“We made the move just as the idea of remote working was taking off, and it is no longer a really unusual situation,” says CJ Brough. “We work as if we are in London, but we overlook the Med and we are two minutes from the beach.” Never afraid of a challenge, CJ and her husband Jim moved their business from London to the South of France two years ago.
CJ and Jim’s baby, George, was born in 2005, and their PR and marketing agency Blunt Communications started trading soon after. With both family and work life thriving, the couple decided it was time for another challenge and baby and business were taken over the Channel to France.
“We were in a pretty typical scenario,” explains CJ. “I had been working as an in-house PR and I gave my job up when the baby came along. After a while I found that I had some time on my hands, so I started freelancing as a PR. I was working on a ‘no coverage, no fee’ basis, which is a rare way of operating in PR, and it really took off.”
The couple was working from their home in Wimbledon and they found that they had very little face-to-face contact with their clients. They began toying with the idea that there wasn’t any need to be in the same city as their clientele or even the same country.
CJ says: “We were finding that we were seeing clients less and less and more often than not it was us, not them, that felt that we should have the occasional meeting. So we went on holiday to France for about six weeks and we took our laptops with us to see if we could work this way. No one noticed that we were away from our desks, so this set in motion a more permanent move to France.”
Jim’s family have a holiday home on the Riviera, so the Broughs knew that region very well, but they decided that they’d like to explore a different side of the country and they eventually decided to house-hunt around Perpignan. They liked the fact that it’s sandwiched in between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pyrenees, and close to the Spanish border. “The fact that it is a largely undiscovered area that is not hugely populated, also appealed to us,” says CJ.
Having settled on an area, the Broughs were surprised to find how different the property searching experience was in France compared with the UK. “We found that the rental and buying of property is all done in a very laidback way. Most of the agents, for example, do not advertise their properties on websites. It’s not that they don’t want to give you the time of day, it’s just that they don’t seem to have the same commercial instinct as agents in the UK.”
Their specific requirements meant that they quickly narrowed down their search, however.
“We wanted something on the beach, but in a village not totally cut off from everything and somewhere with Internet access,” says CJ. “We have ended up renting a lovely house in the working fishing port of Port-Vendres, that is close to the pretty village of Collioure. We are twenty minutes from the border with Spain and forty minutes south of the city of Perpignan with its main airport.
“We have the best of both worlds, a lively village, with a pretty holiday spot just up the road.”
The Broughs decided not to buy their residence in France, as they’d always wanted to ensure that the move was easily reversible. They’ve rented out their London house so that they always have somewhere to come back to.
Read the full article in our April 2009 edition.
