Where can I find a website for some questions about France?

Looking for a website to help us find traditional buildings in France

• What’s the best website for finding traditional buildings in France? I don’t mean the architectural gems that everybody knows about, the chateaux, cathedrals, and other grand buildings. It’s fine if the website includes those, but that’s not our focus. Our interest is in seeing the traditional buildings in different regions--manor houses, town houses, farmhouses, mills, dovecotes, maisons a colombage, granges, lavoirs, and so on.We’d like to find one or two websites we could use each night that would help us discover what might lie along the next day’s route. The websites should offer the ability to search by map and ideally cover the whole of France. We don’t need to visit the interiors. We’d be happy with a walk or drive past. I’m aware that many are in private hands and may not even be visible from the road. We’ve run across such places many times, but we probably missed more than we discovered by chance. This trip we’d like to be more systematic. We use the Plus Beaux Villages site. We use the Michelin green guide, but it doesn’t cover every town or village. Checking a town’s tourism website is hit or miss. A town may not always think of this kind of building as an attraction for visitors and, even if all towns did, checking each one’s website would be time consuming. On driving days we’ll be going through or near dozens of towns and villages. Two of my favorite websites for this purpose have disappeared. One was quid.fr, When the annual went out of print, the website shut down too. The other was patrimoine-de-france.org (with hyphens). There’s another website of the same name but without hyphens that is not as good. Thanks for any help you can give.

• Answer:

  You could try the http://www.fondation-patrimoine.org/fr/national-0/dans-votre-region-13, which is kind of but not exactly like the National Trust in the UK. By the looks of it you can click on a region, and see all of the sites in that region that the Fondation supports.