She fell in love with traditional Japanese homes during a high school trip. At 24, she bought one in the countryside.

• Coline Aguirre bought a traditional home in the Japanese countryside when she was 24.

• She left France and moved to Japan alone to restore the property and start her own real-estate consultancy.

• “It’s been three years now, but it still feels like a dream,” Aguirre said.

Coline Aguirre first started to think about her future during a high school exchange program in Japan a decade in the past.

Aguirre, who was born in Paris but moved around a lot as a little one, spent a 12 months learning in Kanagawa, a prefecture about 40 miles exterior Tokyo.

During a go to to her host household’s grandparents in the countryside, she found that they lived in a traditional Japanese home constructed in the ’70s, with elegant picket beams and stunning tatami rooms.

“That was the first time I slept in a tatami room. Before that, I had only been in really modern city houses in Japan,” Aguirre told Business Insider. “I fell in love, and in that second, I knew I wished to own a traditional home in Japan.”

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Fast-forward to 2021: Aguirre was back in France and working as a freelance photographer. Over the years, she and her mom had nurtured a shared pastime of scrolling through real-estate web sites and window-shopping for homes.

“At the time, I was discovering the real estate market in Japan and noticing the really low prices,” Aguirre said.

In France, a countryside home may simply set her back by 200,000 euros. In distinction, some homes in rural Japan can go for as low as $500.

The distinction was putting, and it obtained her considering about the prospects.

“In France, if I wanted to buy something new with the money I had then, it would be a car or a garage. I don’t want to live in a car or in a garage,” she said.

100 years outdated, minimal

Thus began her hunt for a “kominka,” or a farmhouse, in the Japanese countryside.

Aguirre was trying for a large property, with enough room for a photograph studio. She also wished an outdated home because she felt that they have been constructed with supplies meant to last.

“My criteria was like, a hundred years old, minimum,” Aguirre added.

When she chanced upon the itemizing for a 3,200-square-foot property in Uda, a small city about 50 miles south of Kyoto, she knew she had discovered the one.

“It matched all my expectations. It was huge, maybe a bit too huge, but it had an inner garden, two bathrooms, two kitchens, and a lot of bedrooms,” Aguirre said.

It was also a 15-minute drive to the practice station, and about an hour and a half from the ocean.

With the help of a marketing consultant on a real-estate portal — who despatched her a 20-minute video tour of the itemizing — Aguirre bought the two-story home remotely, without seeing it in particular person.

Aguirre says she paid about 4.9 million Japanese yen for the property in 2022, and at the age of 24, achieved her dream of shopping for a traditional home in the Japanese countryside.

Her husband, who is in the French Army, knew this was her plan soon after they first obtained together.

“From the moment we started dating eight years ago, I already told him I’m going to be a house owner in Japan one day. And it eventually happened,” Aguirre said.

She formally moved to Japan alone later that 12 months. “I had no plan. I was just trusting the universe,” Aguirre, now 27, said.

Her dad and mom have been also supportive of her transfer. It helped that they have been already acquainted with Japan: Her father had spent a 12 months working in Tokyo, and her mom had been to the nation a number of instances on trip.

Growing up, she was used to her dad and mom shopping for and fixing up outdated homes in France.

“I had no perception of what was scary or not,” Aguirre said. “We’ve been doing that so many times, it just felt normal for me to buy a house.”

Restoring the home

Aguirre’s home sits on a avenue where the outdated market used to be.

The avenue reminds her of Kyoto, with its retailers and outdated homes. “The post office is in front of me, while there’s a bank at the end of the road,” she said.

When her home was first constructed in the Nineteen Twenties, the entrance part going through the avenue served as a soy sauce store. Before she bought it, the earlier house owners had used it as a summer time home whenever they visited from the metropolis during the holidays.

In phrases of restoring the property, Aguirre, who now runs a real-estate consultancy, says she has tried to keep as a lot of the unique construction as doable.

The main factor she’s modified so far is getting rid of the septic tank and connecting the property to the public sewage system.

“I haven’t really destroyed so many things besides everything that was added during the ’70s,” she said.

There’s loads left to do, including reworking the kitchen and eradicating the pretend ceilings on the second flooring. Considering the dimension of the property, it has been a slow course of.

“I try to do all the DIY I possibly can,” Aguiree said.

Local contractors have been often more accustomed to working on newer homes with fashionable supplies like plastic insulation, which wasn’t what she envisioned for her own space.

“I started to learn a lot of DIY stuff, like making tiles and waterproofing the shower. But it’s fun. I really enjoy it and I like power tools a lot,” Aguirre said, including that she dived into online tutorials, read books, and obtained advice from her father.

These days, between managing her business and working on the home, Aguirre also runs an online boutique promoting classic kimonos and equipment. On the facet, she affords kimono pictures classes, too.

Living the dream

Aguirre is an element of a growing wave of foreigners who are relocating to Japan.

The quantity of overseas residents in Japan reached a document high of 3,768,977 at the end of 2024 — an increase of 10.5% from the earlier 12 months, per data from the nation’s Immigration Services Agency.

Four Americans who spoke to BI in 2023 listed Japan’s security requirements and relative affordability as causes for their transfer. Others told BI they have been drawn to the thought of renovating one of the nation’s 8 million deserted homes.

Though a lot of the expertise has been rewarding, Aguirre says the hardest half of her transfer was staying targeted on her targets.

“It is tremendous difficult to own that type of big home that wants fixed consideration, while also beginning a business from zero in a new nation with a new language,” she said.

She hopes to improve her Japanese language expertise, but hasn’t discovered the time to take classes.

“For now, my language classes are me talking to my neighbors,” Aguirre said.

Most of her neighbours are between 50 and 90 years outdated and have been dwelling in the space for a long time. Many of them once attended the local elementary school, which has since been remodeled into a maple park.

That said, assembly new people hasn’t been tough. A reasonably large group of foreigners — largely from the US and the UK — live in Uda, she said.

“When you go grocery shopping and you see someone else who is a foreigner, you basically go and talk to them because it’s so rare,” Aguirre said.

Over the years, she’s been launched to new people, sometimes even on the avenue.

Aguirre lives in her home in Japan full-time, and her husband comes to go to her whenever he can. Regarding what is often a long-distance relationship, Aguirre said, “It’s challenging, but I mean, he said yes eight years ago.”

Looking back on her journey, Aguirre says it appears like she’s only begun to scratch the floor.

“Three years is just a trial,” she said. Sometimes, she added, you will need to wait for the thrill of the transfer to die down before you realize if it is actually for you.

That said, Aguire is aware of she made the proper alternative. She hopes to continue growing her real estate business, now a group of three, and finally join traditional Japanese homes with patrons looking for homes and areas for their artistic tasks.

“It still feels like a dream,” Aguirre said. “I just added more layers to my dream.”

Do you’ve gotten a story to share about building your dream home in Asia? Contact this reporter at agoh@businessinsider.com.

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