Dordogne Collection began not with a business plan, but with a family from London, a terrace in the July heat, and a conversation about where to find proper bread. Here is what that taught us — and why it shapes everything we do.
The first guests arrived on a Thursday in July. They were a family from London — two parents, three children, and a grandmother who moved slowly but noticed everything. We had prepared the house the way you prepare your own home for close friends: fresh flowers, a bottle of local Bergerac, a handwritten note with our favourite restaurants scribbled in the margins. We were, as it turned out, considerably more nervous than they were.
What Guests Actually Want
What struck us almost immediately was that none of their questions were about the house. They were about the Dordogne — about the place itself. Where should we swim? Where can we find proper bread in the morning? Is the market at Sarlat worth the drive on a Saturday? Is there somewhere quiet for the children to be in the water without a crowd?
These were not questions a booking platform could answer. They required knowing the region intimately — knowing the season, knowing which baker had started selling in the square on Wednesdays, knowing that the river at La Roque-Gageac is best before ten in the morning when the light is long and the tourist boats have not yet started. They required the kind of knowledge that only comes from living here, or loving here, for years.
Those conversations — unhurried, over morning coffee on the terrace, over evening glasses of rosé as the swallows came in low — planted the seed of what became Dordogne Collection. Not a catalogue of properties. A connection between guests who want to genuinely understand a place and owners who know it with the easy familiarity of people who have walked its lanes in every season.
How We Choose Our Properties
We are sometimes asked how many properties we list. The honest answer is: not many, by design. We have never been interested in volume. What we are interested in is character — the quality of a kitchen garden seen from a stone terrace, the way afternoon light falls through the shutters of a medieval farmhouse, the feeling of genuine privacy that only the right position in the Périgord Noir landscape can give you.
Every property in our collection has been visited in person. We stay if we can. We cook in the kitchen, swim in the pool, sit on the terrace at dusk. We are looking for the things that photographs cannot show: whether a property feels genuinely settled into its landscape, whether the outdoor space is truly usable rather than decorative, whether the whole place has the quality of somewhere that has been cared for by people who love it rather than managed by people who own it.
Specifically, we look for:
- Authentic architecture — stone farmhouses, chartreuses, renovated mills, manor houses with history in their walls. Not modern builds dressed up with exposed beams.
- Genuine outdoor living — a private pool means something different here than in a resort complex. It means three children playing until nine in the evening while the adults open a second bottle. It means a morning swim before breakfast. It means the holiday actually happening outdoors, which in the Dordogne in July and August is where it should happen.
- Position and privacy — many of our properties sit within view of nothing but their own land, a line of oaks, a river valley. That quality of stillness is, we think, what many of our guests are really searching for when they book a holiday rental in the Dordogne.
- Owners who care — we can always tell. It shows in the quality of the mattresses, the thickness of the towels, the folder of local recommendations that someone has actually written rather than printed from a template.
The Kind of Holiday We Want Our Guests to Have
We are not trying to provide accommodation. We are trying to provide the conditions for a particular kind of experience — one where you are properly settled into a place rather than passing through it.
The advantage of a full kitchen is that you can buy a basket of cèpes at the Thursday market in Périgueux and cook them that evening with garlic and parsley from the garden. Staying in a private villa rather than a hotel means the children can be noisy at breakfast and quiet at midnight, and nobody is managing your schedule. It means that the rhythm of the day becomes your own — a late morning, a long lunch, an afternoon in the pool, a drive to Domme at golden hour when the light on the valley makes the whole thing feel slightly unreal.
Many of our guests find that by the third or fourth day, the Dordogne has rearranged their sense of time. That is precisely what we are hoping for.
Our Relationship With the Region
The Dordogne — or the Périgord, as those who know it well tend to call it — is not a region that gives itself up quickly. It rewards the unhurried visitor, the person who takes a wrong turn and finds a pigeonnier at the end of an unmarked lane, who stops at a cave coopérative near Bergerac and ends up talking for an hour about biodynamic viticulture. It rewards, in other words, exactly the kind of travel that is possible when you are based in a stone farmhouse with nowhere pressing to be.
We have spent years building relationships here — with producers, with market stallholders, with restaurant owners who do not advertise and do not need to. When our guests ask us where to eat, we give them the same answer we would give a close friend: the terrace at La Plume d'Oie in La Roque-Gageac, the noix oil from the mill outside Sainte-Nathalène, the walnut wine from the farm twenty minutes from Sarlat that you would never find without a local telling you it exists. That local knowledge — specific, honest, genuinely useful — is part of what we offer alongside the properties themselves.
What We Are Building
Dordogne Collection began with a family from London and a question about bread. It has grown, slowly and deliberately, into something we are genuinely proud of: a small, carefully curated collection of luxury holiday villas in the Dordogne and the wider Périgord, selected by people who love the region and chosen for guests who will love it too.
We are not the largest collection. We are not trying to be. What we are trying to be is the most thoughtful one — the place you come when you want an honest recommendation, a property with real character, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing someone has already done the hard work of finding the best.
If that sounds like the kind of holiday rental Dordogne experience you have been looking for, we would love to show you what we have found. Browse our collection below — and if you have questions, do write to us. We answer every one ourselves.