Residential barge · France
Libria
More than a boat. More than a home.
Libria is somewhere to go.
Life aboard
An address that changes when you decide it should
Libria lets your life flow with the currents of the rivers of France.
The day begins where the water is. Coffee on the aft terrace beneath the white canopy, the bank a single step off the gangway, a table already laid for six because someone always comes. Ducks work the shallows. A cyclist passes on the towpath and raises a hand. By eight the light has crossed the deck, the morning has taken forty minutes longer than it would have taken ashore, and nobody has minded.
Below, there is none of the dark-old-barge melancholy people expect. The deckheads are planked in white, the floors are pale oak, and the windows run long and low at the exact level of the water — so that the river is never a view you go to look at. It is simply there, moving, all day, in the corner of every room.
Aft deck
The largest room has no walls
For most of the year the finest room aboard has no ceiling but canvas, and no walls at all.
Teak lounge seating at one end, a table for six at the other, planters along the rail drawing a low green screen toward the water. The canopy holds the heat off without shutting out the light, so the terrace stays in use from the first warm week of spring until the evening in autumn when you finally go below.
And to port, entirely unromantic and entirely the point: an electric deck crane, strong enough to lift a car off the quay and set it on the aft deck. It is the piece of equipment that answers the only serious objection to living this way. You are never stranded at the water’s edge. Wherever she stops, the car comes too.
Paris
And then, one morning, Paris
You do not arrive in Paris. You wake, one morning, and find it standing at the end of your own deck.
Every house makes a promise about where you will be. Libria makes none. She is content for a fortnight in a lock-keeper’s garden and just as content at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and the distance between those two lives is a few unhurried days of water.
This is the thing worth understanding before anything else on this page. The galley, the cabins, the teak and the brass are all very fine — but they are the furniture of a life, not the life itself. The life is the leaving. It is the knowledge, held quietly at every ordinary breakfast, that the view is provisional; that the willows and the towpath and the church spire you have grown fond of are yours for exactly as long as you want them, and not an hour longer.
Few things a person can own confer that. This is one of them.
The rooms
Bow to stern
Photographs are captioned by where they sit aboard. Room areas and measured plans follow with the sales pack.
Saloon
White leather seating, pale oak floors, planked deckhead. Windows run at water level down the full length.
Dining
An oak table for six, set apart from the saloon and open to the passage and galley.
Galley
Gloss aubergine fronts, white worktops, built-in oven and hob, a deep sink under the window.
Shower room
Walk-in shower with a rain head, teak vanity, stone basin.
Master cabin
Brass portholes, cherry joinery, articulated reading lights either side of the bed.
Terrace
Dinner is eaten outside for a good part of the year, under the shelter of the canopy.
The film
A tour in six parts
Shot from the bank, from the air and from inside her — close to four minutes in all, in the order you would meet her if you came. Each film has sound.
Plays on the published site
The waterways
How far the water goes
Start with the network whole, then break out country by country. France, Germany and Switzerland are one continuous thing: you pass between them without ever going to sea, and every route on these maps connects to every other.
One network, six countries deep. From Bordeaux and the Mediterranean through France to the Rhine; north through Belgium and the Netherlands to Amsterdam; east along the Main and the Main–Danube Canal to Vienna and Budapest. Bâle — ringed — is as far up the Rhine as a vessel of this kind can go. Nothing on this map requires putting to sea.
The heart of it. From the Channel at Le Havre up the Seine to Paris; south through Burgundy to the Saône and down the Rhône to the Mediterranean; west along the Canal du Midi and the Garonne to Bordeaux; east by the Marne to Strasbourg and the Rhine. Every one of those routes connects to the others.
Reached from Strasbourg. The Rhine runs north to the Dutch border and south to Basel; the Main and the Main–Danube Canal carry on east to the Danube, and from there to Austria and, in principle, the Black Sea. The Elbe and the Mittelland Canal open the north.
Basel is the head of Rhine navigation — the furthest point upstream a vessel of this kind can reach, and the end of the connected network in this direction. The Swiss lakes beyond it are beautiful and entirely separate: they have no navigable link to the river.
Spain, Portugal and Italy have navigable rivers of their own, but none of them join this network — reaching those means sea transport. Principal navigable routes shown indicatively; these are not navigation documents. Country outlines from Natural Earth (public domain).
The vessel
Steel, and built to move
A petrol-blue steel hull, cream superstructure, a red boot-top at the waterline. A traditional wheelhouse in varnished timber sits aft of the deckhouse.
- 01RIB tender on bow davits, outboard shipped.
- 02Electric deck crane aft, sized to lift a car aboard.
- 03Fixed canopy on a stainless frame over the full aft terrace.
- 04Bicycle stowage on the wheelhouse roof.
- 05French inland registration, French ensign.
Engine, plating thicknesses, last slipping and the navigation certificate are held in the technical file, available on request.
Gallery
Thirty-three views
Pick a thumbnail, or move through with the arrow keys. Click the large image to see it full screen.
Enquire
Come and see her
Viewings are by appointment, alongside. The full pack — measured plans, survey report, navigation certificate and the terms of the mooring — is released to serious buyers. Enquiries are answered in French or English.