Manoir du Suquet is a working holiday estate with five houses. It is also the base for two parallel projects — one about energy sovereignty, one about leadership — that share the same stone walls, the same long kitchen, and the same unhurried approach to difficult problems.
Most estates are one thing. A winery is a winery. A gîte is a gîte. When something calls itself a hotel, the stream of activity is usually narrow enough to fit a brochure.
Le Suquet isn't organised that way, and never has been. The estate has been our home long enough to accumulate what people accumulate over years — work, interests, ideas that outgrew the conversations they started in. Two of those interests have matured into actual projects that now run from here: ViviSolari, an investigation into rural energy sovereignty, and Safe2Great, a leadership practice built around the psychology of high-performing teams.
Neither is a side-hustle. Both have books, working operations, real outputs. They share the estate because the estate is a remarkably good place to think, host, and test. And because we live here.
The cheapest electricity in history, and why it's being kept expensive.
ViviSolari is a long-form investigation into the rural energy transition — how small producers, small properties, and small communities can exit the grid model that's quietly broken, and what the arithmetic actually looks like when they do.
It started with a €180,000 Enedis connection quote for a 40kW solar installation. That number — and the three years of negotiation that followed — is what the investigation is built on. The book is called In The Dark, and the estate is the working proof of concept: forty kilowatts on the barn, battery storage in the converted stable, and a planned EV charging array under the walnut trees.
Leadership retreats for teams that want to think properly and eat well.
Safe2Great is a leadership practice built on two decades of organisational psychology, published research, and the conviction that most leadership training fails for the same reasons most offsites do — the venue is wrong, the facilitation is wrong, and the group goes home with a folder instead of a decision.
The practice runs retreats for leadership teams at the estate — three to five days, up to seventeen participants, a dedicated training barn, full-estate privacy, and a rhythm that separates hard thinking from good dinners without breaking either. Skip Bowman is the author of Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership, and runs these retreats personally.
Most of what we write in the journal isn't about either project. It's about the region around the estate — the small producers, restaurants, markets, and families who make this corner of the Dordogne what it is. That's its own kind of project, and arguably the most important one. We promote our neighbours on purpose.
If you make something good within an hour's drive of Bardou, we probably want to write about you.