home abroad is often seen as somewhere for children to encounter nature safely and learn new skills. ` Major draws for families buying a second home in the South of France are the educational aspects and the chance to expose their children to another culture,' explains Andrew Hawkins, head of inter- national at Chesterton Humberts. ` Parents are recognising the importance of their children having a second or third language, and owning a second home in a country where a different one is spoken enables their child to pick up a language much more quickly.' A parental backlash against the globalised
era of the iPod and other blandly uniform technological distractions perhaps explains another attraction of second homes in enthral- ling locations. Today, parents often feel that basing themselves abroad for a couple of months of the year is the most effective way of encouraging their children to express their individual imaginations and creativity. ` Over the years, I have noticed what an advantage it has been for our clients' children to soak up new cultures and meet new people from
www.countrylife.co.uk/international
different backgrounds,' says Charles Weston- Baker, head of the international department at Savills, who is currently looking for a house in Rome for a British aristocrat who intends to educate his children there for six months of the year. But Mr Weston-Baker also reckons that
affluent and aspirational families also regard certain geographical regions and resorts as something of a social networking and old boys' network. For instance, Quinta do Lago on the Algarve in Portugal (see page
52), where the average villa price is about €3 million, is not only somewhere children can enjoy legions of activities within the resort, but is a place for them to make the right kind of lifelong friends. ` Owning prop- erties in fantastic resorts means children meet other children from many different countries within their own age, which gives them a broader view,' says Mr Weston-Baker. ` They also make the kinds of friends from around the world that might prove useful in future.' After all, great artists have always needed influential and affluent patrons.
NEED TO KNOW
Some private schools in the UK offer students terms abroad
The Downe House Veyrines Experience is offered to all pupils of the girls' school outside Newbury in Berkshire for one term during the lower-fourth year, when pupils are aged 13± 14. Children are immersed in a French life in Veyrines de Domme, a tiny village in the Dordogne valley where the lessons are taught almost entirely in French by local teachers (01635 200286; www.
downehouse.berks.sch.uk)
For the past 20 years, boys at Cothill House near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, have spent a term at Château de Sauveterre, near Toulouse in south- west France, in their penultimate year at the prep school. Again, all the lessons are taught in French (01865 3908000;
www.cothilltrust.org)
Country Life International, Summer 2010 57
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