Toute allure

After reaching the heights as a successful fashion editor, Karen said goodbye to all that and set about renovating a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, in central western France, and living a simpler life. Her idyll is almost complete: blissfully ensconced in her fully-plumbed, tiled, floored and 'warm as the hug of a pashmina' Maison Coquelicot. Until, that is, a gang of macho Portuguese builders, a procession of Brits behaving badly and the ghosts of boyfriends past begin to arrive on her doorstep.