In 2017, Adriel Sanders, 41, and her two brothers went to Paris for the first time. That trip changed everything for her.
“It instantly clicked. I was like, ‘This is your home. This is where you’re supposed to be in the world and this is where you will always be,” Sanders tells CNBC Make It. “I knew I had to move to Paris.”
Back in the States, Sanders worked as a general counsel for a publicly traded company in Washington D.C., but didn’t enjoy it. She was earning $286,656 a year and lived in a studio apartment where she paid approximately $3,000 a month in rent, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
“What stereotypically happens to most Black women when they work in corporate America is the type of things I experienced my whole career. You’re constantly hitting up against this glass ceiling,” Sanders says.
“I was deeply and truly miserable at the very depths of my little heart and little soul. I knew that it was not sustainable.”
When Sanders first moved in, the rent was $2,319. It has since increased to $2,540.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
After that initial visit with her brothers, Sanders traveled back to Paris several times and decided in 2019 that she would make the move across the Atlantic.
At the beginning of 2020, Sanders quit her job, gave her landlord notice, and started the process of obtaining a French visa. She contacted Adrian Leeds from HGTV’s “House Hunters International” to help her find an apartment and flew to France for a few days while a moving company packed up her belongings and prepared to ship it all overseas.
Sanders landed in Paris the day before France closed its borders due to the covid-19 pandemic.
“The slowness of the world meant that France sped up. We were all operating from the same level of confusion, so the good thing is that I was confused by what was happening, but so was everyone else,” Sanders says. “I arrived the day before the lockdown, so there was no one and it was a complete dystopia.”
Sanders found this apartment just a few days before she needed to move out of her previous place.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
After staying in a few short-term rentals, Sanders signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment that cost 1,550 euros, or $1,815 USD, where she lived for two years. Three months before the lease on that apartment was up, Sanders started searching for a new place on Seloger, an online platform for renting and buying apartments and houses.
She found the two-bedroom, one bathroom apartment she lives in now just two days before she was supposed to vacate her other space.
The rent was 1,980 euros or $2,319 when she first moved in. It has since increased to $2,540 USD.
When Sanders rented her two-bedroom apartment she spent about $5,000 getting it ready for use.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
Sanders lives in what they call an “unfurnished apartment” in Paris, which means she had to purchase her own kitchen cabinets, stove, and washing machine. She estimates that she spent about $5,000 on the kitchen and close to another $10,000 to make the place really feel like home.
“Could I have done it cheaper, 100% but my view is that I don’t know when I will leave so I want to have things the way I want them,” she says.
Now that Sanders has been living in her apartment for over three years, she plans to revisit her search for an apartment to buy. She started looking two years ago, but stopped after touring many places that she felt were overpriced.
“With the advice of friends who have recently purchased in Paris, I am determined again. Finding the right place will be a grind, but I am tired of renting in Paris,” Sanders says. I desperately need more space and I want to get a dog.”
While Sanders wants to set down roots in Paris, she also hopes to eventually buy a home in the countryside too.
“I don’t think it would be nice to put a dog like a golden retriever in central Paris, where he doesn’t have a backyard, so that is my dream,” she says.
When Sanders first arrived in Paris, she did some consulting as a lawyer but has since decided to bet on herself and focus on creating her fashion brand, Adriel Felise, and becoming a full-time content creator.
Sanders is self-funding the production of her initial samples and prototypes, but hopes to raise at least $2 million and have her 10-piece clothing collection ready for launch in 2026.
Sanders is hoping to eventually buy a house in the French countryside too.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
Sanders has been in France for about five years now and says she doesn’t think she’ll ever go back to live in the United States.
“I can’t live there. I can’t function like that. I can’t go back to corporate America and holding my tongue every five seconds every day,” she says. “I wish I had had the courage to move sooner. I wish I had the courage to do it after my first semester of law school to either drop out or enroll in business school and do something different that would have given me more options.”
Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to 1.17 USD on July 23, 2025. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.
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