The older I get, the more I realise how much of a life disappears.

Not the big things.

Those usually survive.

The wedding photographs survive.

The birth certificates survive.

The deeds to the house survive.

The obituary survives.

What disappears are the small things.

The way someone laughed.

The phrase they said so often you can still hear it years later.

The mug they always reached for first.

The route they took through a supermarket.

The stories behind the stories.

The things nobody thinks to write down.

My father was afraid of being forgotten.

Not at the beginning.

Not when he was younger and strong and busy building a life.

Near the end.

When time becomes something you count differently.

He worried about what would happen to all the stories.

Who would remember?

Who would tell them properly?

Who would tell them straight?

I promised him I would.

At the time, I thought I was promising to write about him.

Years later, I realise I was promising something much bigger.

Because stories don’t disappear all at once.

They disappear quietly.

A generation at a time.

A conversation at a time.

A house sale at a time.

A box sent to charity.

A photograph with nobody left alive who remembers where it was taken.

Gone.

Just like that.

Perhaps that’s why I struggle to walk past certain things.

A roll of wallpaper.

A worn cookbook.

A chipped mug.

An old photograph.

A house with tired shutters.

A village café.

A handwritten recipe.

The occasional bargain I absolutely did not need but somehow followed me home.

I tell myself I’m buying objects.

Really, I’m rescuing stories.

The objects simply come along for the ride.

That’s how Maison Adorée happened.

Not as a business plan.

Not as a brand.

But as a growing collection of things that deserved one more chapter.

Things that had already been loved once and deserved to be loved again.

The funny thing is that houses are exactly the same.

I sell houses for a living.

People think I sell stone walls and roofs.

I don’t.

I help stories change hands.

The house remains.

The chapter changes.

France will appear often here.

So will wallpaper, old houses, estate agency adventures, treasure hunts, village life, family stories, cooking, chocolate from the chocolatier fifteen minutes down the road, and the occasional appearance of my husband Vince, whose gift for engineering solutions involving objects never intended for engineering remains a constant source of entertainment.

They are all part of the same story.

Because this Journal isn’t really about things.

It’s about memory.

The objects.

The houses.

The recipes.

The people.

The places.

They are simply the vessels that carry it.

This Journal exists because life moves quickly.

Because memory fades.

Because ordinary days have a habit of becoming important long after they’ve happened.

Because one day somebody will wish they could remember how it all felt.

The light through the kitchen window.

The smell of coffee.

The excitement of finding a treasure nobody else spotted.

The sound of laughter from another room.

The comfort of knowing everyone is home.

So this is my attempt to keep a few things from slipping away.

Not the grand events. They usually survive on their own.

The smaller moments need someone to carry them.

A record of the houses.

The people.

The objects.

The adventures.

The mistakes.

The bargains.

The joys.

The griefs.

The beautifully ordinary moments that make up a life.

If you’ve wandered in looking for wallpaper, welcome.

If you’ve arrived because you love old houses, welcome.

If you’re here for France, treasure hunting, family stories, good food, beautiful objects, or simply because you enjoy poking around in other people’s worlds for a little while, welcome.

Pull up a chair.

The kettle’s on.

We’ve got stories to keep.