Buyer's note helped secure 'top six' holiday home

A man whose holiday rental has been ranked among the best in the country said a personal note was the key to securing it six years ago.

Ben Harrison, has spent £300,000 renovating The Bottle Lodge, a 200-year-old, grade-II listed building in Tixall, near Stafford, Staffordshire.

The venue was recently named one of Hello Magazine's top six Airbnb cottages, which Harrison put down to its unusual octagonal shape.

"I think what we've done with the property is to try to keep its character as much as possible," he said.

"When we moved in there was a suspended ceiling upstairs [and] you couldn't see the dome.

"The first thing we wanted to do was basically build a frame within the roof that followed the shape of the roof, so when you walk upstairs and you look up you can see the shape of the roof as it is from the outside."

Most of the work has taken place in the last year, he added, after getting the relevant permissions.

He said the timing had been "just right" when it came on the market, and he had decided to put in an offer straight away.

After the property went to sealed bids, he said he asked the estate agent to include a personal note alongside his offer, which he believes persuaded the sellers to accept his bid.

"We didn't want to change the building in any way, we just wanted to restore it to the best it could be," he said.

"Once we got all the permissions in place it only took about nine months to go from probably a shell to the finished property."

He also said more people were now looking for staycations in the UK, and this had helped boost its appeal.

"It's the kind of place that me and my partner look for when we want to go away," he said.

"We don't tend to just find a house or a room or a hotel, we tend to look for something a bit more unusual."

Harrison said his first paying guest was a man from Stoke-on-Trent whose partner lived near Stafford when she was younger, and it was booked as a surprise for her birthday.

He added that a lot of the fixtures and fittings had been made bespoke for the property, and that giving it a new lease of life had provided him with a lot of satisfaction.

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