Western Europe, but their landlord used a similar unilateral cancellation clause, so I would assume this scenario could have happened anywhere such clauses exist.

A 5 year lease sounded like a win for everyone at the time. The couple was crazy in love with the house and location, the plan between them and the landlord was to look into them buying the house from him at the end of the 5 year lease, and the landlord saw it as a win because the house had sat empty for quite some time due to the state it was in.

The couple was open to repairing the property in part because they had their eye on buying it at the end of their lease, and in part because while the jobs that needed to be done were numerous, they were almost all shallow/superficial restorations. Nothing that needed permits or inspections, so it was all stuff they could do themselves. The repairs weren’t super costly, hence the only slightly reduced rent, they were just very time consuming, which is why the landlord hadn’t gotten around to doing all that work himself.

The landlord just fucked them over something fierce by cancelling their lease without so much as a conversation, the second he got an interesting offer on the house once the work was done.