So it’s been a while. This is just a quick post to say hello, and thank you to those of you who are still out there and still subscribed to this blog. You have been very patient!
The short version is we’re doing OK: the hotel has become very busy over the last few years. Especially during the summer! We are not that far away from our 1000th booking.
I’ve finally gotten around to updating our photos page with mostly new shots and that should give you some idea of how much things have changed. We’re especially proud of how the garden is doing.
We’re living in our house, at last. In fact we have been there for a couple of years now. It has doors, windows, bathrooms, most of a kitchen, etc!
The downside of being so busy looking after guests is that (surprise, surprise) there are one or two things left to do on the house. But we will get there. More on that in another post, I promise.
Nobody will be surprised to hear that there are some new cats and a new dog: meet Teddy. He’s very sweet and has gone from being a shy quiet dog to a confident yappy dog. Oh well…
Huge thanks to one of our 2025 guests, Vlad, for sharing some amazing drone photos with us. We really should get a drone…
And that’s it for now. Thanks again for still being there for us.
How lovely to hear from you again! It has been a while but you can see the change in the garden around the hotel, which looks much more established. You have started another conversation in our house about moving to a sunny place and renovating something…
Cheers! I realize a four year gap between posts is kind of pushing it, so thanks for the kind reply. :)
Definitely the garden has come on wonderfully. We couldn’t be happier about it.
And I am thrilled to be the agent provocateur who gets that somewhere-sunny conversation started.
Hope things are nevertheless good in Exeter!
It’s so amazing to see your progress and I’m over the moon to hear how well you’re doing. Almost at 1000 bookings?!?? That’s absolutely incredible. I can only guess at how hard you are continuing to work to make all of this happen and I hope that, in the not too distant future, you will find yourself with ‘time’. ‘Time’ because you have enough work completed that the ‘to do’ list becomes a ‘nice to have’ list and that you can instead focus on enjoying all that you’ve achieved. And that your guests become familiar faces, part of the family, that your time together is one of friendship and not just ‘service’.
Much love always
Vicky
Thanks! Yes, we can’t really believe it ourselves and summers have certainly become a bit of a blur these days.
I guess we all imagine that fine day just around the corner when oceans of free time will stretch out generously to the horizon? :) Who knows? Possibly if the hotel continues to do OK we can take on more people soon and that would certainly help.
In the meantime we’re closing for a few months this winter, which is something we’ve never done before. Not to such an extent, anyway. The idea being to both recharge our batteries and also finish off the house.
And you make a good point about guests becoming familiar faces. We have been very lucky in general, I think, in that something about our place seems to attract really nice people. Perhaps it’s all the animals? And I never anticipated how many guests would choose to return, which has been such a wonderful vote of confidence. We have quite a few regulars now, which is great.
Just a thought… some of your Bookings.com reviews mention excellent dinners? Is that through what you refer to as the ‘coffee shop’? Maybe worth advertising this a bit more widely with some pictures and a sample menu? I’d be more inclined to stay somewhere that I wouldn’t necessarily need to leave for food. You’ve created a wonderful oasis that I could imagine just wanting that to be my home base with the occasional walk out to explore the immediate vicinity. With your warmth of hospitality, it would feel like a home away from home and somewhere I would want to return to for meals. xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Oh, wow: you have gone straight to the heart of the matter here! :)
You are absolutely correct that we don’t push the cafe/restaurant as hard as we perhaps should online. There’s a reason for that, I promise!
We do cook evening meals and light lunches for our guests fairly often. But we’re not quite in a position to guarantee to people that we can do it every night. The problem is that it’s just us: we have one employee, Şehnaz, and she’s fantastic, but she goes home by about 5:30pm. So when we do dinner it’s just the two of us. And on days when we’ve had a lot of room change-overs, sometimes we’re just shattered and can’t face shopping, cooking, washing-up, etc.
So there are times when we lean on the local Turkish pizza place (who deliver) or steer guests to a nearby restaurant.
Completely agree that people enjoy very much the feeling of being totally looked after and not having to worry about going out for dinner. And we do provide that much of the time! But our half-heartedness re the restaurant on the website is because we don’t want to promise something we can’t deliver 100% of the time.
It’s a dilemma for sure.