On this blog, we want to share our experience of building an ecological house in the rural region of Béarn, in the French Pyrenees. We hope that our experiments will be useful to others who are embarking on similar paths.
How did we come to embark on such a project? We could start the story a long way back. Here are a few initial answers.
We arrived in Béarn in 2020. Gradually, through encounters, activist commitments and personal development, we turned towards a way of life more directly connected to the land, and decided to explore and rediscover different forms of autonomy – personal and collective – through a subsistence-based approach.
We are not originally from this region. In fact, we were born and raised in very different places. But we are making this our new place of re-existence, from a bioregionalist perspective (*).
We came to the conclusion that building a house was one of the necessary means to further these quests. This is mainly due to administrative restrictions, which prevent us from living in lightweight housing in this region, and financial constraints, which mean that renovating an existing building would paradoxically cost us more than building a small house, especially when using eco-friendly materials.
In this section of our blog, we will try to share, from time to time, more information about our respective journeys and our different motivations... as things become clearer to us!
(*) We will talk about bioregionalism again in a future article, we promise.
Posted on 6th Jan 2026
It's official: yesterday, we signed the final deed of sale for a small plot of land in the Béarn foothills of the Pyrenees. A small piece of land, once covered in forest, where generations of sheep have grazed and which has been watched over for centuries by seven majestic oak trees. A place called...
Posted on 31st Dec 2025
How did I end up here in Miramon? In order to answer this question, I will have to go back to the summer of 2008, my first year in high school. At that time I had not yet realized that my three year curriculum consisted of two years of learning new materials and one year of intense exam preparati...
Posted on 16th Nov 2025
This Sunday, November 9th, 2025, we went to Miramon hill. Bright sunshine, blue sky, autumn wind. On the road from Sainte-Colome, we caught glimpses of the first snows gracing a few peaks, and of many a nonchalant sheep on the green slopes. Expedition members: Mayuan, mum, dad, Ninon, and me. That...