Manoirs & Manor Houses
Between the farmhouse and the château
The manoir is the house of the local lord rather than a great magnate: a seigneurial country house, usually at the centre of the farmland it administered. Hence its visual ambiguity — it borrows the château's turret, gateway and sometimes its dovecote, without ever having had the military function.
How to recognise one
A rectangular two-storey main block, a projecting stair turret — often polygonal — set into the façade, dressed-stone surrounds against more modest walling, and a large fireplace to each principal room. The whole reads as a house of quality rather than a stronghold: the windows are too many and too wide for serious defence.
The regional manoir
The word covers very different buildings depending on the stone to hand. In Normandy, half-timbering and cob over a flint base; in Brittany, granite and slate; in Gascony, narrow local brick and river cobble with dressed-stone surrounds. A manoir is therefore judged locally: the useful comparison is with its neighbours, not with a manoir three hundred kilometres away.
What to look at
Manoirs have usually come through centuries of agricultural use, which is good news for the structure and less good for the fittings. The things to check are roof timbers and covering, rising damp in walls built without a damp-proof course, the condition of old joinery, and electrical capacity. France's obligatory survey covers neither structure nor damp — an independent structural survey is worth commissioning.