InvestigationDouble residentiality is not new but, with the Covid-19 and its repeated confinements, it is attracting more and more urbanites. Especially Ile-de-France residents, who seek to combine attractive employment and city life with space and greenery.
In The Full moon nights (1984), the young Louise, who wants to keep both her lover in Marne-la-Vallée and her nightlife in Paris, decides to live a little on one side and a little on the other, and ends up lose everything. Eric Rohmer’s film was intended to be an illustration of a saying invented by the director: “Whoever has two houses loses his reason. “
It seems that the tide has turned. It is precisely to keep reason that some today decide to live in two houses. Overwhelmed by a year of global pandemic, many city dwellers dreamed of escaping. Some of the lucky ones have succeeded in doing so. As of the announcement, on March 16, 2020, of the first confinement, a million Ile-de-France residents left the capital region to settle in the countryside. But many of these candidates at the start, who have taken a liking to ubiquity, cannot or no longer want to cut ties with city life, and settle into a routine, one foot in the city and one foot in the green, in a less and less secondary residence. They are called “bi-residential”.
World champions
“Many of my husband’s former colleagues have, once retired, sold their Parisian accommodation to go and live in the South where they are bored. Not us ! “, claims Sabine (assumed name), 68, now retired lawyer. With her husband, 73, a former chartered accountant, they have owned a holiday home for the past thirty years near Quimper, by the sea. “It was during the second confinement in October 2020 that we made the switch between primary and secondary, twenty days a month in Brittany, ten days in Paris in our apartment … in the Montparnasse district, like good Bretons “.
Their Parisian home has grown from 95 to 75 square meters, more than enough for two. “So we had our first winter in the countryside. Apart from gardening, our activities are not very different from before. “ The two cars are registered in Finistère – just to escape the anger that a few rare Bretons sometimes pour out on the cars of Parisians – and the mail is forwarded there, but Sabine and her husband do not especially want to cut ties with the capital where they have their children and grandchildren, associative activities, cultural habits, cinema, theater, exhibitions, and friends. “In Brittany, we see few Bretons, rather former Parisians like us”, admits Sabine, who is delighted with the upcoming opening of a cinema in her town, a few minutes from her home, all the more reason to take root.
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