Wealthy Britons are letting out their homes to holidaymakers – but you won’t find them on Airbnb
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Interior designer and former pop star Pearl Lowe rents her Somerset mansion to holidaymakers to cover the “extortionate” energy bills that come with owning a sprawling historic home. For Wiltshire-based therapist Juno Shears, the income from staycationers occupying her five-bedroom former hunting lodge will, she hopes, offset the costs of a family holiday in the Azores; whereas architect Adam Richards’ “sci-fi and Roman-inspired” own-build on the South Downs has, quite simply, “to pay its own rather large mortgage”.
Middle-class Britons have always worked their bricks-and-mortar assets to enhance their lifestyles: think of Edwardian landladies letting their attics to respectable lodgers; or early retirees, stretching their holiday spending power by home-swapping with their overseas counterparts through house exchange companies such as 1961-launched HomeLink.
What’s new is that very well-heeled Britons are getting in the action too: letting out their principal dwellings via vetted villa and holiday brands such as Sawday’s; luxury cottage stable Unique Homestays; and quirky bolthole specialist Coolstays. Partly, posh folks’ new readiness to open up their homes to paying guests is down to the soaring cost of living, with larger piles (with five bedrooms or more) having seen their annual energy bills rise in excess of £3,000 a year since 2020, and mortgages by tens of thousands of pounds.
Partly, too, it’s down to the inflated cost of the luxury holidays this cohort enjoys. Luxury hotel room rates rose 34 per cent from 2019 to 2023, compared to the average holiday package inflation rate of 12 per cent, and in 2023 airline tickets were 53 per cent more expensive than they were before the pandemic, according to the online travel agent Kayak.
The new “Sawday’s set” typically eschew economy sharing behemoth Airbnb, preferring to rent out their homes via curated holiday villa brands which offer a personal service for both holiday bookers and owners, as well as assurance that owners with pricey interiors won’t return home to a wine-stained Ottoman or stag-do traffic cones bobbing around in their ornamental ponds.
It was the cost of living – and a sense of rattling about in a large house now two of her four children have flown the nest – that led Pearl Lowe (a former Britpop wild child, who was a vocalist with indie bands Powder and Lodger in the 1990s), to holiday let her seven-bedroom mansion in Frome, Somerset. “I feel quite guilty we’re in this big, draughty house that we’re not really using,” she explains.
Lowe rents Pearl’s Place, her primary residence in Frome – where she lives with her husband, the Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey, and their two youngest children, Frankie and Betty – as well as a holiday home at the coast in Winchelsea, with Unique Homestays. The Somerset property, which sleeps up to 14 adults and four children, dates from the early 1800s and has an interior kitted out with quirky objets d’art, canopied beds and maximalist twinkling chandeliers, as well as a gypsy caravan and wood-fired hot tub on its grounds. It’s yours for the week for £10,595.
“A photographer once referred to my style as ‘rock ‘n’ roll romantic’,” says Pearl, whose oldest daughter is the model Daisy Lowe, 35. “I think that’s about right: guests definitely have plenty of fun objects to chat about!”
Juno Shears, 43, is keen to flee Blighty on holidaymakers’ bucks. “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 bit towards the cost of a holiday,” says Shears. She plans to start holiday-letting Manor Farm House, her family’s five-bedroom Flemish brickwork mansion, set amid the leafy greens of rural Devizes, in summer 2024 – and has set her weekly starting rate at £4,000. Juno and her husband Chris, a clean energy investor, bought their five-bedroom home in 2018 – “in a bit of a state, frankly”, Shears recalls – from the Crown Estate, who had rented the property to a tenant farmer. The Shears have since invested more than £150,000 in returning the mansion to the grandeur of its Victorian heyday, when it was the fox hunting lodge and weekend retreat of THS Sotheron-Estcourt, a patrician Tory politician.
The Shears opted for Sawday’s, Juno explains, after she recalled the brand being bandied about in her childhood. “All my parents’ rich friends used to book through Sawday’s,” says Shears, whose father was the notable 1980s Chelsea restauranter Harvey Sambrook. “I liked the fact that people who book through Sawday’s are ‘Sawday’s people’ and book with them for their entire lives. It gives you more trust as a homeowner.”
Architect Adam Richards, 56, describes Cadence – his four-bed modernist 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 this house was his pièce de résistance: “something for us as a family to enjoy”. Richards lives at the property with wife Jessica and his three children. The family moved into the house in 2019 following a two-year build. Set against a wooded copse, Cadence has a large central kitchen, secret staircases and a designated kids’ living area, and is a short stroll from Petworth House. Its style, says Richards, references classical Georgian and Roman architecture but is also modern, with nods to the sharp-edged futurism of sci-fi films. Richards’ chief reason in letting his family home to holidaymakers is to cover the cost of his “eye-watering” mortgage and the day-to-day costs of family life.
That said, Richards also likes the fact that paying guests get to enjoy his design. “In designing the house I really thought about the way it interacts with the landscape and changing light levels during the day,” he says. “It’s nice when guests appreciate that.”
The new Sawday’s Set is tapping a mood amongst consumers for authentic and ethical stays. The trend is a repudiation of the generic holiday cottages of the 2010s, with their white walls, paucity of decoration and kitchens featuring two spoons and a colander (a look that’s been dubbed the “Airbnb aesthetic”). It’s also about an impetus to spend holiday funds ethically, in a way that doesn’t exacerbate rural or coastal housing shortages and that’s better for the environment. On these fronts, what beats making the most of another family’s glamorous home as your summer bolthole?
That is, if you plan to be well-behaved. All three families lock their possessions away in lofts or out-of-bounds kids’ rooms when the holidaymakers descend, although there’s always going to be an element of trust in letting strangers sleep in your bed. Studies of Italian home swappers, for example, have found that people willing to open their homes to strangers score more highly on the psychological traits of openness and adventurousness.
The key benefit of vetted villa brands, although they take a higher cut of bookers’ fees (typically 14 to 20 per cent plus annual listings fees of around £300, compared to Airbnb’s average three per cent), is the prospect of avoiding the party brigade.
Pearl Lowe tells me she was recently contacted by a group looking for a celebratory stay for a 21-year-old’s birthday. “I tend to be queasy about having stag and hen dos or 21st birthdays here,” she explains. She was surprised, however, to discover that the group of young women enquiring were booking a tame all-woman yoga retreat. “For a 21st birthday!” Lowe hoots. “I think we need to teach these kids a thing or two!”
