We spent Christmas on the land. No A-frame yet — just a concrete slab we’d poured a few months earlier as an annexe terrace, the hills behind us, and a table set under the open sky.
Halfway through the meal, the sun hit the slab at a particular angle. Anaïs looked at Bolo. Bolo looked at Anaïs. Neither of us said anything for a minute.
That afternoon we decided: we were going to build something on top of it.
Not a pergola. Not a shelter. Something real — an A-frame you could actually sleep in, with walls and a roof and a proper floor. We’d figure out the details later.
The slab was already there. The land was ours. Léon was five years old, running between the trees. Samsam was asleep in the shade. It felt obvious in the way good decisions often do — not like a revelation, but like something you’d always known and just hadn’t said out loud yet.
We started looking at plans that same evening. The build took two years — foundations in under a month, the frame and main structure in four, the roof the longest stretch of all. Friends gave their time and energy. A local carpenter taught us techniques we didn’t have. The trees Bolo planted with his own hands, from seed — the palms, the flamboyant at the entrance — with a thought for Bérénice, a friendship that’s hard to put into words.
