Ensure That Your Dream Villa Isn’t a Nightmare

Dazzled by the life of a British couple in the south of France, more than a million Americans bought Peter Mayle’s book “A Year in Provence,” and thousands have since followed suit, spending at least a summer month in a European home.

My wife and I are among them. Some years ago, we rented a Tuscan villa for a month. We wanted to taste life in a foreign country, grow fluent in a different language, be greeted as regulars in the local shops and feel the maturity of an ancient culture.

Setting this in motion is harder than you might think.

The problem: renting a home sight unseen. Unless you’re willing to make a trip to look over the available properties before you go, your main option is to rely on a mail-order catalog of rental homes--and hope for the best. At least a dozen international real estate brokers publish such listings and will supply them to you free or for a charge of $2 to $4 (refunded if you then rent through them). Among such companies are Home Base Abroad, (781) 545-5112; Vacanze in Italia, (800) 533-5405; Ville et Village, (510) 559-8080; International Lodgings Corp., (800) SPAIN-44, (772-4644); and Interhome, (800) 882-6864.

But is that satisfactory? Can a catalog with one or two photos of each home and a paragraph of description capture the qualities of each dwelling? Though many people using international brokers seem satisfied, other renters arrive at homes alongside a busy highway, at homes reached by virtually inaccessible dirt roads or near industrial villages, or at homes too close to other dwellings.

There’s a better, two-step approach, the one we recently tried. Phone for the catalogs and scan the photographs. Make a tentative choice of several in one compact region and ask the broker to schedule visits to them. Then use an inexpensive, off-season, one-week transatlantic air-and-hotel package (less than $1,000 per person) to scout the tentative choices. Assign a single member of your family to make that trip. The cost is a fraction of what you will later pay for the one-month rental, and it’s a prudent expense. Would you rather risk an unhappy month in a home that’s not to your liking?

Besides using the U.S.-based international brokers to make a list of several potential properties, on arrival you can also ask the local tourist bureau for introductions to local brokers.

On our trip to Umbria and Tuscany, we visited several homes selected from a catalog. All were exactly as pictured but not quite what we had in mind.

Then, using a local real estate broker recommended to us by the Florence tourist office, we found ourselves one afternoon driving up a small mountain road to view the broker’s recommendation. And there it was: three stories; 18th century; fig and olive trees; a reception hall larger than most New York City apartments; a large and ancient kitchen with an open hearth for roasting, say, a small ox; five rooms, four bathrooms; $3,000 for the month of September. It was the perfect vacation. We have been daydreaming about our magical Tuscan holiday ever since.

If you would prefer to go beyond Europe, choosing from villas throughout the world (including the United States and the Caribbean), you might consider Mike Thiel’s Hideaways International, (800) 843-4433 or (603) 430-4433, www.hideaways.com. Instead of acting as a broker, Thiel operates a referral service, representing rental villas from Barbados to Cuernavaca, Mexico, and from the California coast to Thailand and Australia. He issues a catalog twice a year containing color photographs of hundreds of homes for rent. If you see something interesting, you phone Hideaways to get the details. You then contact the owner of the home or condo directly. Membership is $99 a year (if you join online; otherwise it’s $129) for two issues annually of the 148-page “Hideaways Guide.” You save, according to Thiel, by renting direct.