Not long ago, Freya Pomeroy-Rowden was sailing around the Atlantic – and now she’s settled down in a quiet corner of Brittany. Here, she tells Annaliza Davis how running a tearoom in France is by far the best job she has ever had
When Freya Pomeroy-Rowden and her husband Marcus became parents 12 years ago, their plans didn’t involve coffee and cake – or even buying a place in France. “Before this, we always lived on boats!” laughs Freya. “Back in 2010, we undertook a huge project of building a replica of an 18th-century traditional British ship near Plymouth. We built it, launched it, and ran a charter business for eight years sailing all around the Atlantic, with me as the cook and Marcus as the skipper. It was a very nomadic lifestyle.”
The couple spent most of their time at sea, and as part of their business they set up a cargo service between Douarnenez and Cornwall, which is how they got to know northwest Brittany. Marcus’ family had a house in the southern part of France and friends near the vineyards, so his family had a lot of French connections and his mum speaks French. For Freya, however, her only prior experience of France had been a couple of ‘horrific’ language exchanges back in school.
“I prefer it when the café’s busy; when it’s quiet, the time drags on – a bit like sailing when there’s no wind!”
“We were a bit nervous about moving here because of the language: I had schoollevel French, which I’d mostly forgotten, while Marcus had practically no French and is dyslexic, so we knew the language would be a challenge. In around 2015, we’d reached a point where we really wanted to have a home – not just because we’d had our son, but because we really wanted a base with a workshop and a garden so we could have a family life and pets.
“In the UK, we’d been based in the southwest ports and initially hoped to find somewhere in Cornwall, but it simply wasn’t within our budget, so we looked further afield. We considered other English-speaking countries, but I hate flying so that immediately eliminated
Australia or Canada! Through our sailing trips, we’d come to know west Brittany and especially Douarnenez, which hosts a major maritime festival every other year, so we started looking in that area and were lucky enough to find a house nearby with a workshop and plenty of space, as well as a berth for our boat in the town.”
LIVING ON DRY LAND
Freya admits that the first few years of life on dry land – in a foreign country – were tough. Initially, they were still sailing for months at a time, which made it harder to make friends local
