by Interior designer and former pop star Pearl Lowe rents out her mansion in Somerset to holidaymakers to cover the “ruinous” energy bills of owning a sprawling historic home. For Wiltshire therapist Juno Shears, the income from residents occupying her five-bedroom former hunting lodge will, she hopes, offset the costs of a family holiday in the Azores; but, quite simply, the “sci-fi and Roman inspired” architect Adam Richards has “his own rather large mortgage” to pay on the South Downs.
Middle-class Britons have always worked their bricks-and-mortar assets to improve their lifestyles: think Edwardian aristocrats letting their attics to respectable lodgers; or early retirees, extending their holiday spending power by house swapping with their overseas counterparts through home exchange companies such as HomeLink launched in 1961.
What’s new is that the Brits are getting in on the action too: letting their mainstays go through a scrutiny meal and holiday brands such as Sawday’s; stable luxury cottage Homestays unique; and weird borehole specialist Coolstays. In part, a brave new willingness to open up their homes to paying guests is due to the skyrocketing cost of living, with larger piles (with five or more bedrooms) rising above £3,000 a year on their energy bills from 2020. , and mortgages under thousands of pounds.
In part, too, it is due to the inflated cost of luxury vacations for this cohort. Luxury hotel room rates rose 34 percent from 2019 to 2023, compared to the average package holiday inflation rate of 12 percent, and in 2023 airline tickets were 53 percent more expensive than they were before the pandemic, of according to the online travel agent. Kayak.
The new “Saudi tier” of the sharing economy tends to stem from the behemoth Airbnb, which prefers to rent out its homes through holiday home curation brands that offer personal service to holiday bookers and owners, as well as assurance that owners with expensive interiors will not return home. to a wine-stained ottoman or stag-do traffic cones bobbing around in their ornamental puddles.
It was the cost of living – and a sense of excitement in a big house now that two of her four children have flown the nest – that led Pearl Lowe (Britpop’s wild child, who was a singer with indie bands Powder and Lodger in the 1990s), to let her seven-bedroom house in Frome, Somerset. “I feel quite guilty that we’re in this big draughty house that we’re not really using,” she explains.
Lowe rents Pearl’s Place, her main residence in Frome – where she lives with her husband, Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey, and their two youngest children, Frankie and Betty – as well as a holiday home on the coast in Winchelsea, by Unique Homestays. The Somerset property, which sleeps up to 14 adults and four children, dates from the early 1800s and is furnished with quirky objets d’art, canopied beds and twinkling ceiling chandeliers, as well as a gypsy caravan and warm wood-burning stove. tub on his lands. It’s yours for the week for £10,595.
“A photographer once referred to my style as ‘romantic rock’n’roll’,” says Pearl, whose eldest daughter is model Daisy Lowe, 35. “I think that’s quite right: it’s guests are sure to have plenty of fun things to chat about!”
Juno Shears, 43, is keen to escape Blighty on a bookie holiday. “With two growing boys and [my husband] able to work from anywhere for a month in the summer, it makes sense to use the house to earn a little towards the cost of a vacation,” says Shears. She plans to start holiday letting Manor Farm House, her family’s five-bedroom brick Flemish home, set in the leafy meadows of rural Devizes, in the summer of 2024 – and her weekly starting rate is set at £4,000. Juno and her husband Chris, a clean energy investor, bought their five-bedroom house in 2018 – “in a bit of a state, ironically”, recalls Shears – from the Crown Estate, which rented the property to a tenant farmer. The Sears have since invested more than £150,000 to restore the mansion to its Victorian-era grandeur, when it was the foxhunting lodge and weekend retreat of Conservative Tory politician THS Sotheron-Estcourt.
The Shears chose Sawday’s, Juno explains, after she remembered the brand being mentioned in her childhood. “All my parents’ rich friends used to book through Sawday’s,” says Shears, whose father was the famous Chelsea restaurateur of the 1980s, Harvey Sambrook. “I liked that the people who book through Sawday’s are ‘Saturday people’ and book with them for life. It gives you more confidence as a homeowner.”
Architect Adam Richards, 56, describes Cadence – his modern four-bed family home in Petworth on the Sussex Downs, listed with Unique Homestays from £5,250 per week – as a “labour of love”. Having designed hundreds of homes for others, he explains that this home was a piece of permanence: “something for us as a family to enjoy”. Richards lives in the property with his wife Jessica and three children. The family moved into the house in 2019 after a two-year build. Set against woodland, Cadence has a large central kitchen, secret staircase and designated children’s living area, and is a short walk from Petworth House. Its style, says Richards, refers to classical Georgian and Roman architecture but is also modern, with nods to the gritty future of sci-fi films. Richards’ main reason for renting out his family to vacationers is to cover the cost of his “paid off” mortgage and the day-to-day costs of family life.
That said, Richards also likes that paying guests get to enjoy his designs. “When designing the house I thought a lot about the way it interacts with the landscape and changing light levels throughout the day,” he says. “It’s nice when guests understand that.”
The new Sawday’s Set is addressing consumer sentiment for authentic, ethical timepieces. The trend is a rejection of the typical holiday cottages of the 2010s, with their white walls, sparse decoration and kitchens with two spoons and a colander (a look known as the “Airbnb aesthetic”). It’s also about encouraging ethical spending of holiday funds, in a way that doesn’t lead to rural or coastal housing shortages and is better for the environment. From this point of view, what better way to use another family’s delightful home as your summer bolthole?
That is, if you intend to be polite. All three families lock their possessions in lofs or children’s rooms off-limits when the holidays come, although there will always be an element of trust in letting strangers sleep in your bed. Studies of Italian home swappers, for example, have found that people who are willing to open their homes to strangers score higher on the psychological traits of openness and adventure.
The main advantage of Villa brands is vetting, although they take a higher cut of booking fees (typically 14 to 20 per cent plus annual listing fees of around £300, compared to an average of three per cent for Airbnb), than to avoid the party. brigade.
Pearl Lowe tells me she was recently approached by a group looking for a celebratory stay for a 21-year-old’s birthday. “I’m usually worried about roosters and chickens or having a 21st birthday here,” she explains. However, she was surprised to learn that the group of young women inquiring were booking all-female yoga retreats. “For a 21st birthday!” Lowe’s skins. “I think we need to teach these kids a thing or two!”
