Simon and Ceri Tinley live in the French Alps with their three-year-old son Mattieu, running a luxury ski chalet company and an independent overseas property brokerage, as Ceri tells Katie Wood
“We were living on Jersey in the Channel Islands after completing our time at Plymouth University. Simon worked as a lawyer and I was at Deloittes as a Trust Manager. Tempted by the way of life and our interest in skiing, we were keen to see whether it was feasible to move to France full time. We decided to take a year out in 2001 and completed a ski season in the French Alps and then arranged to do some travelling over the summer.
Running a chalet in the French ski resort of La Tania, we started to fall in love with the idea of living in the mountains. On our return from travelling, we put our flat on the market and bought a camper van. The following winter we toured around the ski resorts that we hadn’t visited before, trying to find a place to call home. During the trip Simon was offered a rare opportunity of a year-round position with a ski company, managing their portfolio of properties.
Once we were based in France we felt we were settled enough to get married, which we did in the ski resort of Val d’Isere. It was a fabulous destination and the church there is very beautiful and a perfect location, and so our friends and family came out for the week to help us celebrate.
We bought a chalet in a typical French village in the 3 Vallees ski area, although it was nowhere near finished: it still had breeze blocks for walls and only a wood burning stove installed for heating. Undaunted, we decided to take on the challenge of turning it into our home.
Read more in the November issue of Living Abroad Magazine
