The idea of a time-based slice of holiday home has several attractions.  Unlike an individually owned holiday home, it comes free of tedious maintenance obligations – so when you’re there, you’re on a real holiday instead of an extended cleaning, gardening and guilt trip.  Nor are there any worries about security in your absence, or arranging holiday lets to help cover costs.  And, crucially, it’s a relatively affordable means of acquiring your own base in a lovely part of the world.

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Romanticism and painstaking attention to detail sell the properties themselves – but the practicalities of the scheme mark this out as a relatively affordable low-hassle, and apparently unique route to a holiday home most of us could only fantasise about.

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It works like this:  you buy a share in a UK limited company whose sole asset is the property and its contents.  The company cannot die (meaning there are no complicated French inheritance tax problems to worry about), so the share belongs to you and your family in perpetuity.  This entitles you to three or four weeks’ sole occupancy, spread throughout the year on a rolling calendar system:  it depends how many weeks per year constitute a share, and whether any half-shares have been sold, but there are typically between 12 and 17 shareholders in total.  If you want out, your share is offered first to the other shareholders, and can then be sold to other interested parties.