Removals from Fulham to France

France is the easy one, relatively speaking. The crossing is short, the roads at the other end are good, and the route is one we run often enough to know where the vehicle will actually stop for the night. That does not make it paperwork-free — a move to France is still a customs export, as it has been since Brexit — but it does make it the most predictable of the four routes out of Fulham.

Two quite different kinds of move go this way. There is the working move: a job in Paris, a flat in the eleventh or out in Boulogne-Billancourt, a firm start date and a household that needs to arrive in one piece and on time. And there is the house move: somewhere in the Lot or the Gers, bought over a couple of years, being furnished properly at last. They want different things from us and they get planned differently.

What we move to France

Whole households out of Fulham terraces and mansion flats — furniture, beds, kitchens, books, artwork. Partial loads where the SW6 property is being let furnished and only the personal things are going. Single-room consignments for students and for people taking a posting with a furnished flat at the other end.

Export packing is a step up from domestic. Upholstery is wrapped and sealed rather than blanketed, because it is on a vehicle for longer and handled more. Mirrors, marble tops, glazed cabinet doors and framed art get purpose-built crates. Anything you have kept the original packaging for — a television, a monitor, a piece of audio equipment — travels in it.

The route out of SW6

From a Fulham address the vehicle either goes west onto the A4 and round the M25, or south over Wandsworth Bridge and round the bottom of the M25 — which is the usual choice, because the M25 anticlockwise to the M20 is the shorter run. Then down the M20 to Folkestone and onto the shuttle.

On the other side, at Coquelles, the roads fan out. The A26 heads south towards Reims for Paris, Burgundy and anywhere east. The A16 runs down the coast for Normandy, picking up the A28 and A11 for Brittany, the Loire and the whole western side. For the south-west it is the A10 corridor past Tours and Poitiers to Bordeaux, then east into the Dordogne. Provence and the Côte d'Azur mean the A6 and A7 down through Lyon, which is the long one.

Ferry routes are the exception rather than the rule, but they earn their place for Normandy and Brittany. Portsmouth to Caen or Cherbourg, or Poole to St Malo, lands the vehicle close to a lot of properties that would otherwise be most of a long day's drive from Calais.

Customs and the transfer-of-residence process

Since Brexit, your furniture leaving the UK is an export and arriving in France is an import. The mechanism that stops you paying duty on your own sofa is transfer of residence relief, and it has conditions: the goods must be used personal effects that you owned before the move, and you must genuinely be transferring your normal residence to France.

French customs will want a detailed inventory — bilingual or in French, itemised and valued realistically. Not "box of books" but a list that a customs officer can reconcile with what is on the vehicle. They will want evidence of the change of residence, which in practice is a certificat de changement de résidence or the equivalent documentation your consulate directs you to. And they will want proof of the French address: a bail for a rental, an acte de vente or a notaire's attestation for a purchase.

We prepare and lodge the export side, raise the transit paperwork before the vehicle moves, and tell you exactly which documents you need to obtain and when. The pieces only you can get — anything requiring your signature, your residency application, your French address proof — are the ones worth starting on first, because they have the longest lead time.

Second home, or actually moving?

This distinction matters more than anything else on this page. Transfer of residence relief applies when France becomes your primary residence. If you are staying UK-resident in Fulham and furnishing a holiday house in the Charente, that relief does not apply and the goods are a conventional import with duty and VAT assessed on their declared value.

Plenty of people genuinely do not know which category they are in when they first ring. That is fine — but it needs settling before we finalise the inventory valuation, because the two scenarios are valued and declared differently and correcting it afterwards is painful.

Delivery at the French end

Paris is a city delivery with city problems: narrow streets in the older arrondissements, courtyards with an archway a large vehicle will not pass, buildings with a staircase that makes a Fulham mansion block look generous. We plan it the same way we plan an SW6 mansion-block collection — find out what the access is, and size the vehicle and crew to it.

Rural France is the opposite problem. The property is easy once you get there; getting there is the issue. Tracks, low branches, a bridge with a weight limit, a courtyard entrance built for a horse and cart. Send us photographs of the approach at survey and we will decide then whether the final leg needs a smaller vehicle.

Timing

We will not give you a transit figure on a web page, because it depends on whether your load is dedicated or shared, on the destination region, and on how clearance runs. What we will do is set out an expected window in your written quote for your specific move, and tell you plainly what would shift it — a shared load waiting to fill, a documentation query, a delivery address that needs a transfer.

Read the European moves overview for how dedicated and shared loads differ, or look at Spain and Portugal if France is one of several options you are weighing.