About Claire Durand
Claire Durand started out as a French language teacher and cultural immersion specialist, convinced that learning a language meant stepping into the rhythm of everyday life. She worked with students who wanted more than grammar—they wanted to understand how the French gather at the market, why shutters close at midday, and what a salle des fêtes really sounds like on a Saturday night. For years, her work revolved around words, accents, and the invisible scripts that shape daily routines.
Then she moved into a stone village house in the Drôme, and something shifted. Her students began asking questions she hadn’t anticipated. They wanted to know how to decode a property listing full of abbreviations like séjour, chauffage électrique, and DPE. They asked why houses in Alsace looked nothing like those in the Ardèche, and whether it was normal for a bathroom to be listed as a salle d’eau without a toilet. Claire found herself explaining more than language—she was explaining how the French live, build, and make a home.
What began as practical tips for a handful of newcomers grew into a genuine fascination with regional architecture and housing customs. She learned to read a village by the colour of its shutters and the slope of its roofs. She discovered that the layout of a farmhouse in the Périgord tells a story about centuries of rural life, and that buying an apartment in Lyon comes with a set of unspoken rules no textbook ever covered. The language never disappeared from her work—it simply found new ground. Regional dialects, local building terms, the vocabulary of notaires and estate agents: all of it became part of the same curiosity.
Today, Claire writes about historic cottages, apartment hunting in French cities, renovation quirks, and the subtle link between language and the places people live. Her guides blend the patience of a language coach with the hard-won knowledge of someone who learned by doing—roof beam by roof beam, winter by winter. She still believes that understanding a culture means understanding how people arrange their kitchens, why they choose certain materials, and what it means when a house is described as de caractère.
On Run Languages, she shares these stories and practical insights, inviting readers to see France through its houses, streets, and the quiet decisions that turn a building into a home. Whether you’re daydreaming about a stone cottage in Brittany or trying to make sense of a rental contract in Bordeaux, Claire writes for anyone who wants to go deeper than the surface—and who suspects that the right words can open more than just doors.