It’s the kind of move to strike envy into the heart of daydreamers the world over.

A 30-something couple have put their high-flying careers on hold to buy and renovate a fairy tale 1860s castle in the Vendée region of France.

Doctor Erin Choa and her French fiancé Jean-Baptiste Gois, a mechanical engineer, decided to take the plunge after they spotted the whimsical property on the market for €680,000 (around £585,000): roughly the same price of a one-bedroom London flat.

“We’d always talked about doing something like this one day but we were planning our next stage in life and we thought ‘why does it have to be something we do when we’re retired?’ A daydream evolved into reality,” Choa tells the Evening Standard.

“The thing that clinched our decision was having a search online for properties. For the price of a one-bedroom flat in London, we could buy our 20-bedroom house in France with land and outbuildings and the ability to run a business to make it work and pay for the renovations.”

How one couple paused their careers to buy a 20-bedroom French castle (for the price of a London flat)