Lydia – An American – Australian on the Cap.

Meet Lydia. Lydia lives with her wife and their two young daughters in Cap d’Antibes.

Lydia is an American – Australian on the Cap. I met her at the Cap d’Antibes school where we both have daughters and asked if she would mind being feature on the blog. She very kindly agree so we met up the following week in her home. I asked her to tell me a little bit about her life and how she ended up living here.

“I grew up in the States on the East Coast. I spent the first 23 years of my life in New Jersey and Virginia. After that I moved to Australia and  I spent 15 years there. I was working for Qantas in IT project management. My wife, Celine, had moved to Australia from France and was working for Amadeus.  Amadeus and Qantas had a big project together which is what brought her to Australia. The two companies were collaborating on a new reservation and weight and balance system for the airline. Celine and I didn’t work together but we had friends who introduced us pretty much straight after she arrived in 2005. We became an item soon after. We moved back to France together in May 2008”.

What made you decide to move to France?

“When Celines contract was up we decided to come back to France. We could have stayed on in Australia but Celine was ready to come home.. Her whole family is here, not in Antibes, her parents are in Normandy and her sister and brother are in Paris. She missed France and she really wanted to come back and I was ready for a new challenge. Celines’ parents had bought this house on the Cap back in 1988”.

“Her father was the chief engineer for the French side of the Channel Tunnel. He had done lots of other projects, bridges and stuff before but this was his biggest project . The family lived in Lyon and Paris when Celine was little and then after they bought this house to use as a holiday home. Celine had lived here permanently  for a few years before from 1993 until 2005 when she left for Australia. Until then this had just been a holiday home for the family”.

“When Celines parents were younger, before they had kids, they fell in love with Antibes”.

“They used to come here on holiday. Then when Celine was 14 or 15 they started coming for the holidays as a family. They rented on the Cap in various places and started looking for a holiday home. Then in 1988 this place came up for sale and they bought it. The house has 3 levels. Each level is completely independent from the other. They bought it like that”.

“When Celine and I moved back here from Australia we lived up on the top floor initially, it’s not a big apartment but it has a large terrace which is very beautiful”.

“We were, at that time, also trying to have children which didn’t turn out to be easy. In France you have to be a man and a woman to have children so we went through the process of IVF treatment back in Australia. Basically I had to commute back and forth. I went back every 4 months for 3 years which was a bit of a challenge to say the least. It took us 5 tries to have Jemma and then the very next go I had Mila. I had also had two other pregnancies before Jemma but unfortunately they didn’t work out and I lost them both, so it was all a bit of a mess”.

“Most French women in our situation they go to Belgium, Spain or the UK”.

“In those countries the door has to be anonymous. In Australia you have to have a known donor. This for us was perfect because I had a long time friend in Australia who was willing to help us.  I have known him for over 15 years. He is gay with a partner of 20 years”.

“So while  we were still in Australia and we knew we wanted children we asked James and talked to his partner and they very kindly agreed to help us. We all went to lawyers to make sure that everyone was on the same page and everyone understood the expectations. Now we see them 2 or 3 times a year. They go on holidays with my family in the States, so it’s sort of like an extended family. The girls know where they came from. They know James gave the grain to make them and that he is their biological daddy but we are their parents. We try  to be as open as we can and to me, the more  love that they have in their lives the better”.

“For me it’s perfect because the roles are very clear. James and his partner are in  Australia. They don’t want to raise children but they want these girls in their lives. They love them as their own. To me in our situation, it’s as good as it could get”.

“When we had Gemma the top apartment became  too small so we moved down to the middle level which works out great”.

“Celine’s mum now stays upstairs when she comes for the summer every year. Before it was the other way around, we were in the top flat and she stayed in the middle apartment where we are now. Celines dad doesn’t come because he now hates Antibes. He says he likes it out of season but not in the summer. Celines’ mum likes the heat so she only wants to come in the high season so he never comes with her”.

“The third apartment downstairs we use for visitors. I used to use downstairs as my my workshop but in the summer we have so many people visiting that it became impractical. Celines’ sister has 4 kids and they come, my parents  come for a month every September and my brother and his wife are coming in a few days. It’s so beautiful here  that, as you can imagine, we have a lot of visitors. For us this house is ideal because we have our level which is completely independent and the other levels are independent too which is great for guests”.

“The house now belongs to Celine, her brother and her sister. Her parents gave it to them as a gift a few years ago. The parents still look after the maintenance and the upkeep but, legally,  it now belongs to the three children”.

“When we returned to France form Australia Celine continued working  at Amadeus in Sophia”.

“I was obviously busy trying to have babies for the first 4 years. Since coming back to France I have changed entirely what I want to do with myself work wise. I started making jewellery three years ago and now I have just applied for my auto-entrepreneur status here. I just recently launched my website and  twice a year I do a sales evening event at a friends’ house on the Cap. So I am really just getting started with all of that”.

“Before I met Celine I had never been to Cap d’Antibes. I had been to Paris and the Loire valley but I didn’t know Cap d’Antibes at all”.

“I remember when I was in Australia I was talking to a French friend who came from Nice and I was telling her that we were going to move to Cap d’Antibes. She said “Lydia I don’t think you understand how special this place is that you’re going and how lucky you are that you are moving there”. So I had some idea that the people who I respected appreciated this spot in the world. It made me think ok this place must be pretty cool. So then we came over in 2006 for a holiday in the summer and I recognised  straight away that wow this is a special place”.

“Up until that point I had had reservations about moving here, to this house”.

“You see things weren’t easy with Celines parents so we had to decide is the compromise of living in this house and not paying much rent but taking care of the  place. Is that compromise worth the family dynamics and for a long time to me it wasn’t. But now it totally is worth it to have this little spot. To be here and be able to walk to school with the girls. It’s so peaceful here and I like the dynamics of the cap. Especially at school, the demographics literally go from one end of the spectrum to the other and I LOVE that. When People think of Cap d’Antibes, they think of wealth. That’s all they think of but I see and talk to  every single level of person  here and I love that”.

“Ok there are magnificent villas without question. I have probably only seen 10% of what’s really there behind the  gates and behind the hedges. But to me I love the fact that it’s not just that”.

“People have explained to me that each decade if you look at the school  you can see who is buying on the Cap. Just by looking at the nationalities of the children. In the 50’s and 60’s it was the Americans, then the English, and now it’s the Russians”.

“There is an amazing demographic, I don’t know if it’s unique to here but it’s definately unusual. You don’t find that very often”.

“When you first meet the parents of the kids at the school you don’t know what walks of life they come from. You have some parents like one of the girls friends mother, she’s a cleaner and then you have somebody else who married into a family who have grown roses here for the last 100 years. A family world renowned and who have streets named after them but you don’t know that when you meet them. It’s amazing and that’s great! And if you’re open to anybody well then this is the perfect place to be”.

“It’s more cool than any negative that might come with certain social economic levels. Either way you can get nightmares on either end of the financial spectrum can’t you”.

Is there anything you dislike about living here?

“I’m not into ostentatious displays of wealth myself I am not superficial like that. I can of course appreciate a beautiful villa but there are some things that I don’t appreciate. I’m not in to buying my  way into a restaurant and I don’t like it that if you have money you get special treatment.,  I know that this happens everywhere, that’s the world, but it can be particularly acute here. However I really try to concentrate on the positive stuff “.

Do you think you will always live here?

“I miss Australia, much more than America. My family are all in Amercia but once I left the States I knew I wasn’t going back. Ideally, after the girls are grown, I think I would want to go back to Australia”.

“For now I like the discipline of the French school system for the girls. Especially for one of them, She needs that direction. But college here is tough so I could live in Australia when the girls are older”.

“Whilst my parents are alive, my dad is 86 and my mum is 81, I can’t leave France.  For them the US to France commute is just about ok. I couldn’t have them travelling between the States and Australia”.

“They come to visit us quite often so it’s important to me that we don’t move too far as I am pretty close to my parents”.

“So I could stay here but long term I would love to live half and half between Australia and Cap d’Antibes”.

“If we were to stay in France it would be very difficult to leave the Cap. It would be very difficult to leave here and go anywhere else in France, even on the Cote d’Azur, Really!! I Love it!! Every day I wake up and I’m like this is it. This is a fabulous place”.

“As I touched on before it is difficult for us being here due to the situation with Celines’ parents. We got married in Antibes and Celine is now going to adopt the girls officially but unfortunately her parents don’t accept our life together”.

“They know we are married and they know that we have 2 children together but they still don’t recognise us as a family unit”.

“These family dynamics can make being here quite difficult for us”.

“To be fair when Celines mother comes, which she does every summer, she does interact with the girls. She is quite good with them. But the relationship for her is with two children that live on the middle floor rather than with her grandchildren. She gardens a lot and potters around and the girls they love doing that too, so they do speak. She is perfectly civil and nice with the girls. With me, well  we tried a few times but every time we have a conversation it normally ends up just being ugly. For me it’s just the way it is and it’s better that we don’t communicate. We say bonjour and we leave it at that”.

“Thankfully my family has accepted the girls as their grandchildren but there were also difficult times with them in the beginning”.

There was a time when we didn’t speak because of my way of life but they have mellowed somewhat since then and they now accept us as a family. We have completely different outlooks on the world and life but as long as we steer clear of anything too controversial or politics we all get along fine”.

“The difficult situation with the French side of the family is the compromise I spoke about earlier. Having that whole family situation, even for two or three months out of the year, is that really worth it to live here”? “And the answer is Yes”!! “It is”!

“It’s so amazing here that you put up with what you have to put up with or you deal with what you have to deal with in order to have this amazing life we have here in Cap d’Antibes”.

What is your favourite thing to do here?

“We love to kayak and to walk the coast walk around the cap, we do that all the time. Whenever we have visitors I take them on this walk. I love the fact that we have million dollar villas on one side but a public walking path for everyone right in front of them and of course we go to the beach all the time. The girls love the water which is only 400 metres down the street”.

Lydias’ Jewellery can be found on her website Donely Design.

To receive new interviews and updates on news and events on the cap sign up for the newsletter.