On the whole this was a really lovely place to stay. the furnishings and bathrooms are high quality and the kitchen is beautiful. The setting is lovely, although the house is on a road, its quiet at night and all the views are to the rear, and they are stunning overlooking the mill pond which is teeming with wildlife. The standard of cleanliness was exceptional, one of the best Ive ever been to. There are lots of lovely places to visit nearby, although if the weather is good, the garden and hot tub are hard to beat.
However, there were a couple of very small niggles that could be sorted very easily. and would make a big difference to the convenience of the house.
If you are self catering for a large group, ie 14 , (the house capacity,) there is insufficient cutlery. Basically one knife fork and spoon per person, no small knives and forks for a starter, and an almost complete lack of large serving dishes. Apart from that the kitchen is equipped for everything you need to cook the most elaborate meal you could want,there's just nothing to serve it on!
There is a top of the range Aga, which seemed rather tempremental, I dont think we managed to get it working totally for our whole stay, we managed, but as there is a note telling you what to do if the Aga doesnt work, perhpas it is an indication that a service is overdue. One of our party has the same oven at home, so it definitely wasnt user error. We could have telephoned the host, but for resasons mentioned later, we decided it wasnt fair to bother her.
The other thing that could be made clearer in the property description is that if there are more than 8 of you the only place you can all sit down together is at the dining room table, as the
sitting room has an absolute maximum seating capacity of 8 and that is a squeeze. If you were thinking of renting this house for a family Christmas for example, it might not be suitable if you were intending to fill it to its capacity of 14 people.
Communication with the host was good until the last couple of days, I beleive a text telling where the key would be was sent, but I didnt receive it. On arrival it took 25 minutes for me to find anyone to let me in. I gathered from the managers father
that her baby was due that day,and so perhaps that was why things were not as efficient as they had been prior to that, this was also the reason that we didnt bother anyone about the cooker.