320 m² house with pool, Le Sémaphore district in Sainte-Maxime

Le Sémaphore is a residential district of Sainte-Maxime, away from the seafront, in the pine-covered hills. It is an area of detached houses on large plots, quiet all year.

This type of district is what stays lived in out of season in a town where more than one home in two is a second home. You meet your neighbours in February, not only in August.

The town centre, the port and the beaches are a few minutes away by car. At this distance from the shops, a car remains necessary day to day: that is the counterpoint to the quiet and the space.

This house is not to let and we do not publish its rent. It belongs to the family portfolio and it is occupied.

We present it for the same reason as our other occupied properties: a landlord's site should show what it owns, not only what it is trying to let. That tells you who we are and how long we have been doing this job.

If a house of this size ever came free in our portfolio, the people whose application is already with us would hear first. That is how we work across all our homes.

LOCAMAXIME has been letting in Sainte-Maxime since 1971, as a private landlord. We let our own homes, long term, with no agency in between: no letting fees, no application fees and no tenancy drafting fees.

Our genuinely available homes are gathered on the Properties page, with their rent, their service charges and their energy certificate. To hear when a home comes free, send your application : two documents are enough and it stays valid for all our properties.

By convention, a room with a bed is called a bedroom, and a bedroom with its own shower room is called a suite. Here the three bedrooms each have their own bathroom and WC: they are three suites, and that completely changes the way the house is lived in.

In a classic family house, a shared bathroom organises everyone's mornings. With three separate shower rooms, everyone keeps their own rhythm, and the house can host two generations, or friends, without anyone passing in a corridor in a dressing gown.

This layout also explains the floor area. Three bathrooms and three WCs easily come to forty square metres of wet rooms, on top of the large dressing room. The 320 m² are not only living room: they are first of all independence.

The dressing room, finally, is the storage that houses of this size often forget. It stops wardrobes taking over the bedrooms, which is exactly what makes a large room look small.

A 320 m² house entirely on one level is rare, because it is the most expensive format in terms of ground coverage. On a sloping plot like those of Le Sémaphore, it calls for earthworks that nobody undertakes for the look of it.

The benefit shows in daily use. No stairs, so no room off limits on a day with a plaster cast or a bad back. The outdoors is reachable from almost every room, which is the Provençal logic: you live outside as soon as the weather is fine, and it is fine often.

It is also the format that ages best. A house with floors becomes a problem as its occupants grow older, and then sells badly or gets left at the wrong moment. A single-storey house never raises that question.

Finally, single-storey living simplifies upkeep and heating: no volume lost in stairwells, no floor heated for nothing. Over 320 m², that is no small matter.

We may as well say it, since we publish no rent here: a 320 m² house with a pool in Sainte-Maxime sits in an order of magnitude unrelated to our flats.

The figures published by SeLoger in January 2026 put the average rent for a house in Sainte-Maxime at around €15.90 per square metre, within a range from about €10 to €21. These averages cover houses of every size and say nothing about this one, but they give the scale of the local market.

On top of that come the running costs of a detached house, which bear no relation to those of a flat: pool upkeep, watering and pruning the garden, heating a large volume, insuring a detached house with grounds.

That is one of the reasons why this type of property rarely goes to year-round letting in the gulf. The return from a summer season is on another scale, and the stock of large houses shifts almost entirely to holiday letting.

Sainte-Maxime has around 14,000 permanent residents for close to 17,000 homes. More than one home in two is a second or occasional home, and that proportion is not spread evenly across the town.

The seafront districts hold the tourist stock and empty out largely in winter. The residential areas in the hills, which include Le Sémaphore, keep a permanent population: families, retired people, working people employed around the gulf.

That is what makes these districts liveable all year rather than pleasant for two months. The neighbours are there in January, the district is looked after out of season, and the houses do not sit with their shutters closed from November to June.

The trade-off is dependence on the car. From the heights, you do not walk down to the market and back with the shopping. It is the classic Sainte-Maxime compromise: space and quiet are paid for in minutes on the road.

This house has belonged to the family portfolio for a long time, and that is why it has never gone out by the week. On the Côte, a 320 m² house with a pool is first of all seen as a seasonal yield: here, that is not the case.

We have no lessons to give to those who choose otherwise. We simply note what that choice does to a town: when the large houses switch to holiday letting, the families who live here can no longer find a home, and they end up settling forty minutes away by road.