Interior designer and former pop star Pearl Lowe is renting out her Somerset mansion to holidaymakers to offset the “extortionate” energy bills that come with owning a sprawling historic home. Wiltshire-based therapist Juno Shears hopes income from tenants staying at her five-bedroom former hunting lodge will cover the costs of a family holiday to the Azores; whereas architect Adam Richards’ own “sci-fi and Roman-inspired” development on the South Downs is, quite simply, “having to pay its own rather large mortgages”.
Middle-class Britons have always used their physical presence to enhance their lifestyles: think Edwardian landladies renting out lofts to respectable tenants; or early retirees are boosting their holiday spending power by swapping homes with overseas counterparts through home exchange companies such as HomeLink, founded in 1961.
What’s new is that wealthy Britons are also getting in on the act: renting out their main residences through vetted villa and holiday brands such as Sawday’s; luxury country house barn Unique Homestay; and quirky bolt hole specialist Coolstays. Upscale people’s newfound readiness to open their homes to paying guests is due in part to the rising cost of living; Larger piles (five bedrooms or more) have seen annual energy bills rise by more than £3,000 a year since 2020. and mortgages worth tens of thousands of pounds.
This is partly due to the inflated cost of the luxury holidays enjoyed by this group. Luxury hotel room prices rose 34 percent from 2019 to 2023, compared to the average vacation package inflation rate of 12 percent, and airline tickets were 53 percent more expensive in 2023 than before the pandemic, according to the online travel agency. Boat.
The new “Sawday set” typically eschew economy sharing giant Airbnb, preferring to rent their homes through select holiday villa brands that offer personal service for both holiday bookers and property owners, as well as the assurance that owners with expensive interiors won’t be returning home trim to wine-stained ottomans or bachelorette traffic cones bobbing in their pools.
What drove Pearl Lowe (a former Britpop wild child, vocalist in indie bands Powder and Lodger) into this was the high cost of living and the feeling of cramming in a big house; Two of his four children have flown the nest. In the 1990s), he rented his seven-bedroom mansion in Frome, Somerset, for holidays. “I feel pretty guilty because we’re in this big, draughty house that we don’t actually use,” 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, and a holiday home with Unique Homestays on Winchelsea beach. The Somerset property, which sleeps 14 adults and four children, dates from the early 1800s and features an interior outfitted with intriguing artworks, four-poster beds and maximalist twinkling chandeliers, as well as a gypsy caravan and wood-fired hot tub. The tub is on its own property. It’s yours for £10,595 per week.
“A photographer once described my style as ‘rock’n’roll romantic,” says Pearl, whose eldest daughter is model Daisy Lowe, 35. “I think it’s true: guests definitely have a lot of fun objects to chat about” !”
Juno Shears, 43, wants to escape Blighty with holidaymakers’ money. “With two boys growing up and [my husband] Since I can work from anywhere for a month in the summer, it makes sense to use the house to earn some holiday expenses,” says Shears. He plans to start holiday letting his family’s Manor Farm House, a five-bedroom Flemish brick townhouse nestled among the lush greenery of the Devizes countryside, in the summer of 2024 and has set the weekly starting fee at £4,000. Juno and her husband Chris, a clean energy investor, bought their five-bedroom home in 2018 – “a bit provincial, frankly,” as Shears recalls it – from the Crown Estate, which leased the property to a tenant farmer. The Shears have since invested more than £150,000 in restoring the mansion to its Victorian glory, when it was a fox-hunting lodge and weekend retreat for noble Tory politician THS Sotheron-Estcourt.
Juno explains that Shears chose Sawday’s after remembering discussing the brand in her childhood. “My parents’ rich friends would book through Sawday’s,” says Shears, whose father is well-known 1980s Chelsea restaurateur Harvey Sambrook. “I like that the people who book through Sawday’s are ‘Sawday’s people’ and have been booking with them their whole lives. It gives you more confidence as a homeowner.”
Architect Adam Richards, 56, describes Cadence, a four-bed modernist family home in Petworth on the Sussex Downs, listed on Unique Family Stays from £5,250 a week, as “a labor of love”. Having designed hundreds of houses for others, he says this house is the most important thing to him: “something that will give us a good time as a family.” Richards lives at this facility with his wife, Jessica, and their three children. The family moved into the house in 2019 after two years of construction. Set against a woodland grove, Cadence has a large central kitchen, hidden staircases and children’s seating area, and is a short walk from Petworth House. Richards says his style references classical Georgian and Roman architecture but is also modern, referencing the hard-edged futurism of science fiction movies. Richards’ main reason for leaving his family to holidaymakers is to cover the “eye-watering” mortgage costs and the day-to-day expenses of family life.
However, Richards also loves the fact that paying guests enjoy his design. “When I designed the house, I really thought about how the house interacts with the landscape and changing light levels throughout the day,” she says. “It’s nice that guests appreciate it.”
The new Sawday’s Set reflects the consumer mood towards authentic and ethical stays. The trend is a rejection of the generic holiday homes of the 2010s, with their white walls, minimal decoration and kitchens containing two spoons and a colander (a look that has been dubbed the “Airbnb aesthetic”). It’s also about a momentum towards spending holiday funds ethically, in a way that doesn’t add to housing shortages in rural or coastal areas and is better for the environment. On those fronts, what’s the best way to make the most of another family’s dazzling home as your summer retreat?
That is, if you plan on being nice. Every third family locks their belongings in lofts or children’s rooms out of bounds when holidaymakers arrive, but allowing strangers to sleep in your bed will always create an element of trust. For example, studies of Italian house swappers found that people willing to open their homes to strangers scored higher on psychological traits such as openness and adventurism.
The key benefit of vetted villa brands is the possibility of avoiding partying, although they do take a higher cut of the booking fee (usually 14 to 20 per cent, compared to Airbnb’s average three per cent, plus an annual listing fee of around £300). brigade.
Pearl Lowe told me she was recently contacted by a group looking for celebratory accommodation for a 21-year-old’s birthday. “It bothers me that there are bachelorette parties or 21st birthdays here,” she explains. But she was surprised to learn that the group of young women doing the research had booked a compliant, all-female yoga retreat. “21. for his birthday!” Lowe shouts. “I think we need to teach these kids a thing or two!”