What It's Like to Rent an Old Country House in Britain
Where I grew up, an old house meant felt overshoes and a guide leading you from room to room. In Britain you can rent the whole thing for a week, key and all. This is what it is really like.
Where I grew up, a beautiful old house means a castle or a chateau, and you only go in with a guide.
You queue at the side door and are given a pair of enormous felt overshoes. Then you shuffle round the parquet in them, in a group, at the pace of the slowest person in the group, while the guide leads you from room to room, tells you the history of each one and watches to make sure nobody touches the furniture or sits on anything. At the end you are released into a courtyard and you buy a postcard.
That is the only way in. Renting a historic house for yourself, with your own key and your own shopping in the fridge, is simply not done where I come from. Old houses are for being shown round.
So when I moved to Britain I did not quite believe what happens to the size below. The castles are behind a rope here too. But some of the old houses with six bedrooms and a staircase you could film a costume drama on are hotels, and a good many more are let by the week, the whole house at once, to whoever books it first.
The sums are not what people assume. A house that sounds absurd for two is perfectly ordinary for twelve, and twelve is roughly the number of people most families can produce at Christmas without trying.
What the photographs show, and what they leave out
Every one of these houses is advertised with the same four photographs, in the same order.
The staircase, shot from the hall floor looking up. The drawing room, in the twenty minutes of the year when the light comes in low and turns everything gold. The lawn from above, taken by a drone on the one dry afternoon in April. And a bath, usually freestanding, usually with a window behind it, usually with nothing in it.
None of these are lies. They are the house on its best afternoon, which is usually the afternoon that gets photographed. What they never show you is the corridors.
We rented one for my mother-in-law's birthday, an old rectory that somewhere between the last vicar and us had acquired a jacuzzi and a cinema room. It was lovely. I also got lost in it more than once, setting off to find a room and arriving at a different one.
My first thought was how lucky somebody is to own a house like that. My second, about a minute later, was what it must cost to keep one standing, and that this was presumably why I was allowed to sleep in it at all.
There was no guide in that rectory, which is probably why I kept getting lost. No one led us from room to room or told us the history of each one. We sat on whatever we liked and had a birthday.
For a woman who used to shuffle round castles in felt overshoes, that was the luxury. Not the jacuzzi.
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