A Year in Burgundy

by Calla Jones Corner

My 300 year-old vintner's Burgundian cottage. photo: Loïc Sieve

Bye Bye Montecito, Bonjour Meursault

I feel like I’ve come full circle from growing up in a remodeled Connecticut cow barn to now living in a remodeled, 300-plus-year-old Burgundian winemaker’s, rustic house in a French village.

It’s been a seven-decade, long journey with many stops in-between. 

The penultimate pause in this odyssey was in a 1930’s Montecito, California cottage that lasted fifteen years, until Richard, my British husband of fifty years, died in 2022. We had moved to southern California from Scottsdale, Arizona, via Manhattan, New Canaan, Connecticut, Chatham, Cape Cod, Brussels, Belgium and Lausanne, Switzerland, at the suggestion of our three grown children, all of whom were living in California.

We had first moved to Arizona and had only been in our elegant Tuscan-style villa in a new gated golf community for three years when we realized that our intended retirement home with a pool, a book-filled den for Richard, and stunning kitchen and studio-casita for me to teach art and guests, that we had made a huge mistake. Even with air-conditioning, golf on our doorstep, and scenery to die for, Arizona was just too hot for living year-round. We still had our beloved, waterfront house on the Cape, where we managed to live one whole year, between Brussels and Manhattan, through howling winter gales, and brutal ice storms, but we weren't ever going to make it our year-round home. 

“You'd love California,” our children said. Little did they know that we did love our cottage in Montecito, being near children and grandchildren and friends. But as we began to live under constant threat of wildfires and mudslides and California's cancel culture, we began to realize we'd made a mistake.

We seriously thought of moving to France after reading Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. We spoke French from living twenty-one years in Switzerland and Belgium, so, unlike Mayle, we knew how to communicate with locals, banks, and bureaucrats.

Little did we know that Richard would develop an inoperable brain tumor and that the high-quality medical care he received from local doctors and hospital was such that we decided to stay put in Montecito.

Time to Move

Our son was in northern California when Richard died, but one daughter had moved to Australia with her French husband and three children and the other daughter, Annabelle, and her husband had been living in Meursault, France for over a dozen years and now had two children.

It was Richard's illness and his exceptional care and our children, two of whom were still in California that kept us there. Until Covid, when daughter and family moved to Antibes, France so the grandkids could attend school after the French school closed in LA. And the film industry closed down. My son-in-law is French and in the film business.

When Richard suddenly died in my arms of a stroke the morning after the Queen died, I had no idea what to do. It was Annabelle, who came over a few weeks later and suggested I sell the house and move to Meursault. I was not scared to do so, as I spoke French and had lived abroad for many years. I was more afraid of staying in California, where the culture was anathema to me (as it was to Richard) and I felt that Montecito was no longer safe, especially for a single, elderly widow. Because of growing up with a Swedish mother, I felt very European as a child and grew up with two languages at home: Swedish as well as English.

A Home Purchase, Sight Unseen

I was lucky to have the option to move to France as Annabelle has dual citizenship. Richard was a Brit, or I wouldn't have been able to move as easily as I did.

When my children suggested I should sell the cottage and move to Meursault, I jumped at the chance. It took nine months to extricate myself from Montecito – along with half a century of collecting furniture and belongings – but only two days to buy a house that my daughter, Annabelle, saw on the internet, in this charming village of eighty wine-making families.

I will have been here a year at the end of March.

Coincidentally, my small house in Meursault had been remodeled by a California couple who were already remodeling their second, bigger house a few streets away. Finding the house was a stroke of luck as Burgundy, especially charming villages like Meursault, have seen an increase of Anglos, Europeans, and Americans (and house prices) from Provence and Bordeaux, where real estate bargains rarely exist. When I saw the ancient, hand-hewed beams, wide wood and Burgundian tiled floors plus new double-door fridge, granite counters, dishwasher and gas stove and the first-floor powder-room, I told Annabelle's friend Dorothée, the realtor, "Sold".

I could see myself living happily in the barely 1,000-sq-ft three-story winemaker's home, a seven-minute stroll from town and my family. After six months I had brightened up the interior with my father's watercolors of Switzerland, painted pieces of furniture, and bibelots I had learned to make during the five years I spent at the famed Isabel O'Neil studio in Manhattan.

In my container from Montecito, I had managed to fit the early American table my father found in the 1930s at a junk shop in Manhattan. Also, the Sheraton hall table from Richard's home in Hove, England, a few antique Tibetan pieces bought in Macau while on a bargain-hunting spree from Hong Kong, and the beautiful carpets Richard's father had collected during his ten years in Mesopotamia as a doctor. Ikea, in Dijon, and a French antique here and there did the rest. 

Though I do miss my American friends (and more probably Montecito’s near-perfect weather), I finally feel at home.

Calla Jones Corner in her Montecito, California garden. Photo: Richard Corner.