luxury waterfront house for sale Perigueux, France

In Périgord Blanc, on the banks of the Isle, a 3 ha estate with a residence, a hydroelectric mill, apartments, and outbuildings. The estate stands on the bank of the Isle and forms a coherent setting with the river. The drive from the gate skirts tree-dotted meadows, scattered with old millstones, reminders of the site's milling past. The mill dates from around 1100 and once belonged to the De Bourdeilles family. In 1172, when Guillaume de Bourdeilles entered religious life, he gave it, with all its rights, to Chancelade Abbey. Over the centuries that followed it pounded millet, pressed oil, fulled cloth, ground plaster, and prepared paste for faience potteries, before becoming a sawmill. A Fontaine turbine was installed in 1895, and after a fire in 1902 the mill was rebuilt with a new one. It went on to serve as a hydroelectric plant and helped bring drinking water to the village, a sign of its central place in the community. Although continually enlarged and altered until the 20th century, the property has kept a remarkable architectural unity. Its facades of rubble and white Paussac stone are punctuated by quoins and dressed-stone surrounds. Some fifty regularly spaced windows, symmetrical elevations, and a restrained composition give the house and mill a look that anticipates Art Deco. Their small panes set off the shelly limestone, where many fossil fragments still show. The residence was built in the same spirit and has the solid, orderly bearing of a notable family's home. It now comprises four apartments and is associated with the family of the poet André Champarnaud, who also worked as a flour miller at the Amenot mill and bought the estate in the 1920s.