A Bit About Us

We’re Peter and Natalie, your hosts at Le Cheval Blanc in St Antonin Noble Val.

We first discovered the town in 2010 while cycling across France.  Natalie’s bike broke here and St Antonin has no bike shop and no station, so we were stranded.  The idea of moving to France came a little later, but try as we might we couldn’t find anywhere we liked better than St Antonin!

Our original plan was to run cycling holidays, which we did, but that was Peter’s passion.  Natalie really wanted to do something with food, so we decided to use the accommodation we’d developed for the cycling holidays as a vegan b&b.   The two businesses ran in parallel; sometimes we’d host cyclists, sometimes vegans, sometimes both.  Right from the start Natalie offered evening meals and it wasn’t long before that was the main reason people stayed with us – and of course they soon started to ask for cookery courses. We obliged, loved doing them and our customers kept coming back for more. Fast forward a few years and the vegan cookery school had squeezed out pretty much everything else. First we stopped promoting cycling holidays (although we still do them from time to time if people ask nicely), then we stopped doing b&b and started declining most offers of catering work. We can’t quite believe that we now own and run a successful vegan cookery school in the south of France, after all it’s not what we set out to do. But we now realise it’s what we should have done right from the start!

In our former lives Natalie was a freelance researcher in the health sector with a background in psychology and Peter was a university lecturer in sociology.  We were both finding our careers less and less fulfilling and wanted a quieter life in a beautiful place where we could follow our own interests.  We’re delighted to say that despite all the hard work, it’s working wonderfully!