Need an affordable mansion? Try Poland
"This one one might do,” I said to my wife, Anna, who was in the car tending to howling babies.
We'd pulled up in front of a 50-room, 17th Century palace in five acres of parkland - complete with 60ft ballroom and chapel. And all for sale at a quarter of the price of my three-bedroom semi in South-East London.
Call it a mid-life crisis - I'm 48 - but I needed a big adventure. The fact that the former bishop's palace was in rural Poland made it all the more attractive.
Poland is friendly, has a low crime rate and good schools. Of course, I'm biased - I married a Polish girl. So there was no hesitation: we bought our palace.
Abandoning prosperous Britain to live in down-at-heel Poland might appear contrary to some. “Proper bonkers,” said a friend, the actor Nigel Planer.
Others called it brave, my parents called it barmy.
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For around £50,000, we discovered we could get a five- or six-bedroom house set in at least half-a-dozen acres and just a few minutes from the ski slopes.
With Poland's economy growing at twice the speed of Britain's and a Polish wife in tow, I felt well placed to ride this boom. We briefly put our plans on hold after Anna became pregnant again. But when baby Henryka was born, we decided to return to Poland.
Having set our hearts on the idea of restoring a glorious ruin, we met the provincial historic monuments officer who put about 20 dots on a map denoting stately homes for sale.
For two days we drove around inspecting them, seeing everything from vast Hapsburg palaces to run-down manor houses.
Sometimes we didn't bother getting out of the car, while at others, I'd sneak through a broken window and explore.
Finally, we came to the tiny village of Piotrowice Nyskie in Opole province, South-West Poland.
There, in the centre of the village, was an imposing 17th Century former palace.
At 12,000 sq ft, it was on the small side compared with many we'd seen, albeit eight times the floor space of the average London house.
Although it was run-down and in need of plenty of tender loving care, at least its roof was intact and it had glass in most windows.
Still, we had to have it.
After another trip and a formal viewing, we bought it for £150,000 and moved in last August.
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Under layers of paint on the chapel steps you can make out a coat of arms, apparently that of one of the bishops of Breslau. The walls are one metre thick and there's an awful lot of masonry, including brick buttresses supporting the rendered elevations.
It's over-engineered. The Poles are fine engineers, but over-engineering is a German trait.
There is good reason for this. The house is situated in the part of modern Poland that used to be in Germany, a region known as Lower Silesia.
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It appears to be a fixer upper. There are pictures if you go to the link. One of the problems with fixer uppers in Poland is most of the craftsmen have immigrated to the UK for more pay and work. Still, it is an interesting investment, if you are willing to invest the time in learning the language. He did not indicate whether they have internet connections at the mansion with the one meter thick walls.
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