Category: Tuscany

For years I dreamt of owning a little Holiday Cottage in Tuscany and in 2019 that finally came true. And then along came a global pandemic. Three long years after I was there in February 2020, I finally got to go back. And wow, it is still as incredible as I remember it! So I’m going to attempt to share it with you how it’s taking shape…

Yes, just one pandemic later and I finally got over to see Woodfarm Tuscany after all this time. The idea was that I finally jump on a plane, and head over to check on the work to the house. In the lead up to the pandemic hitting, and whilst out of lockdown is over there, the builders have done all the work that I asked for.

Whilst these photos are still very basic, as the place is completely unfurnished, and not quite finished, hopefully you will get the idea. There are some panoramic shots, which does have the effect of making the walls look curved, but I can assure you they are not.

What I am attempting to do on here is to demonstrate to you how the house will look. I have uploaded loads of photos, and I’ll try to use them to give you a sort of virtual tour.

There is also a video on here in which I tour the house, so hopefully you can start to get an eye idea of how it is beginning to look.

As I write this on Easter weekend in 2023 I hope to be going over sometime in May with my builder mate Darren, to equip and fit a kitchen, as well as take all the furniture and furnishings that I have been building up over the last few years and storing in Suffolk.

What I’m going to do is to make Woodfarm Tuscany feel like Woodfarm Suffolk, but with a Tuscan twist. And those views. Oh my god, those views!

Features you’ll enjoy;

• Huge, East & South facing terrace with Pizza oven and BBQ
• Fully equipped kitchen with valley views
• Dining room with open fire and views over the valley
• Double East facing bedroom with valley views
• Lounge with two South facing windows looking across the valley towards Lucca
• Wet room with roll top, ball & claw footed bath overlooking the valley
• Loo with a view!
• Air conditioning in every room
• Shutters on all windows
• 45 minutes from Pisa airport
• 20 minutes from the stunning medieval city of Lucca

As it stands I’m the only one that really knows all of the contents of the lock up, and how the house feels. What I can tell you is that it’s going to be amazing! Anyway here you go…

First things first, We are in a tiny hamlet called Piazza Di Brancoli, and this is a pic of the entire hamlet! Trebbio, our little Tuscan hideaway, is the white one with a yellow house tucked beyond it.

As you approach the house on foot, this is the view that greets you. We are the white one to the left, and there’s that neighbouring house to the right.

All with commanding views over the valley!

The house kinda looks like a bungalow as you approach, as the accommodation is all on the top floor of three. The other floors are lower down the hillside. We may make these habitable in the future.

The first thing you’ll smell is this fragrant rosemary bush…

This is a panorama, which does distort the terrace, but you can see how breathtaking these views are!

Ok, we venture inside. This is the kitchen. Please ignore the dangling wires in every room, I’ve not had any light fittings installed yet. The opening at the far end is the dining room.

Panorama showing the end of the kitchen. The door and window overlook the terrace and the East. The terrace is bathed in the sun as soon as it comes up, and all day. it drops behind the house late in the afternoon, and we will have another, smaller patio on the West side of the house, so you can chase it round for the evening sun!

Then you walk through from the kitchen to the dining room. The table will sit in the window, again looking to the East. Traditional Tuscan fireplace on the left. You will also notice the air-con unit in this photo, which is heating as well for the colder months.

From the dining room, there’s a corridor leading to the bedroom (that doorway to the left), and then it opens up in the lounge at the end.

This is the bedroom. Views to the East again, so it’s sunny in the morning and all day. You’ll notice that all the windows have internal shutters, which do keep the house cool in the hot weather if you want to close them.

This is the lounge. Two South facing windows with commanding views down the valley towards Lucca. It’ll have a big, four seater leather sofa, Smart TV etc.

Panorama of the lounge looking towards the bathroom. That window frame is the old bathroom window!

And last, but by no means least, here’s the bathroom. As you can see, it is a wet room, with a roll top, ball & claw footed bath. I had a new window put in, and had it lowered so you could get more of that incredible view! You can take a shower, have a bath, brush your teeth, or even sit on the loo, with the most beautiful view to the South, down the side of the valley towards Lucca.

This is the view from the loo! I was only sitting on it to take the pic. I did have my jeans on!

And this is what it looks like when the sun goes down…

What I figured I’d do now is to show you the floor plans, so you can get more of a feel for how it all knits together…

So, videos. Pleeeeeease be aware that these are NOT professional vids, they are just shot (badly) with my battered iPhone. But you will hopefully get the idea.. Here’s the outside…

And here’s the inside…

Trebbio, Via Ombreglio, Piazza Di Brancoli, Lucca, Toscana

We will be aiming to offer 3 night weekends from a Friday, 4 night midweeks from a Monday, and full weeks from a Monday or Friday. We haven’t finalised pricing etc just yet, and I don’t yet know when we will be open for bookings. I will tell you though!

Want to make sure you are amongst the first to know the minute we release our availability calendar? Just make sure you are signed up to our VIP Tuscany list. We don’t share your details, or sell it or anything. We work way too hard to do dodgy stuff like that, I promise!

Make sure you have a good look around the rest of the Tuscany section of the website HERE, and rest assured we will be putting together all the info you could possibly need to enjoy a break in Tuscany.

Extraordinary Holiday Cottages. According to the old advert, The Halifax gave us extra. And that’s what we have always aimed for at Woodfarm.

I do a lot of thinking whilst running this little business of mine. One of the things that I think about is why, over the decade since I started Woodfarm, it has exceeded all of my expectations. I think it’s all about providing extraordinary holiday cottages, as opposed to ordinary. This little paperweight on my desk was a present a number of years ago and it’s a constant reminder to me of how we go about doing what we do. I hope you find it interesting.

I’ve always tried to be transparent when marketing the business, and in everything we do. I think people like that. All I ever tried to do from the start was to provide accommodation that I’d want to stay in, give a warm welcome and provide as many extra touches as we can think of, to make things special. On top of that we spend a lot of time finding out about the places that our guests can go, and the things they can do whilst staying with us. It’s not difficult.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it ain’t rocket science! Maybe I should stop right here in case all my competitors read this and suddenly start beating us. But I wanted to try and crystallise my thought process for you, dear (hopefully interested) reader, so that you can see where I’m genuinely coming from as a business owner. 

If I can put these thoughts down lucidly for you, then maybe then it’ll go some way to explaining why our guests love what we do and keep coming back. Maybe you are one of those guests, in which case I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Genuinely. Without you, I’d be in trouble. Or maybe you are someone who is really delving into why you should come and stay with us? In which case, welcome. Grab a cuppa and read on.

I wrote this early in 2020, just before we finally left the EU. I’m more than a little intrigued as to why we have continued to beat our performance as a business, year on year, since the referendum in 2016, when there is so much doom and gloom out there. And I think it boils down to one thing: extraordinary holiday cottages, not ordinary.

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I wanted to focus on the extra little touches we have become known for. Again, it isn’t hard to do! As I said, all I have ever done is to provide accommodation that I would want to stay in. That’s it! Secret revealed! We have added all the little touches that I would like. I am human. You are human. So we should more or less appreciate similar touches, right? 

I know we’re all different and that it’s subjective, but in general I think that holds true. At the risk of getting all cliché on you, we try to please most of the people most of the time. I truly believe that we cannot please all of the people all of the time. But you won’t stop me trying. And ten years in now, it seems to have worked for us.

We’ve always been dog-friendly. Since the start, that was one of the major ‘selling points’, or USPs. In the early days though I used to be really worried that we shouldn’t put off non dog-owners. But over time we developed such a stronghold and a reputation within that market that I stopped worrying about it. We still have plenty of guests who don’t own dogs and they seem to keep coming back. Again, this isn’t rocket science, we just make sure that we have a very strict cleaning and maintenance regime, and target responsible dog owners.

So being dog-friendly is very much our market. One of the major things for dog owners is that we have extraordinary holiday cottages, that happens to welcome dogs. In the early days I used to get a lot of feedback from guests who would tell me that they struggled to find somewhere that accepted dogs, let alone welcomed them. Or somewhere that didn’t feel as though they were staying in a kennel!

So what is it that we do to attract dog owners? Well:

• We openly welcome your dogs, usually before you humans, as we know that many guests treat their dogs like family. 
• We welcome up to three of them and more by arrangement if possible. We started with two, but soon found that a lot of people have three. We restrict numbers purely to maintain our high standards.
• We provide dog bowls. 
• We provide dog towels. 
• We have fully enclosed Gardens with every Cottage. The Barges are a bit different of course. 
• We have a fully enclosed two-acre meadow at Woodfarm HQ, for the exclusive use of our guests. 
• There’s a smaller section with the meadow for nervous or less agile dogs. 
• We have ‘Mucky Pups’ Shower Stations in each garden. 
• We provide sensitive dog shampoo with the Shower Stations. 
• Your dog gets yummy dog treats with every stay. 
• We have optional dog hampers if you want to treat your four-legged family. 
• VIPooches; this is where your dogs return free on your next stay. 
• Dog-friendly pubs all handpicked for you. 
• We have loads of info on vets, dog-friendly beaches, walks etc. 

Ok, that’s the dog-friendly stuff. What else do we do to make them extraordinary holiday cottages? 

Five Star Reviews

At the time of writing (February 2020) we have almost 400 Five Star Reviews on TripAdvisor, almost 100 on Google, and over 200 on Facebook. I was really worried when we first listed with Tripadvisor, just in case we hadn’t got it right. The other review platforms followed and I had the same worries. But with around 700 Five Star reviews at the time of writing, we’ve got something right I think. I don’t mean that arrogantly at all, but we have all tried as a team to excel in what we do. At some point I’m sure someone will think we didn’t excel, but I’d hope that when that day comes, people will say to themselves, “They’ve got 700 Five Star reviews, and one that’s not so great. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Visit England Gold Standard Awards

We have these for every Barn and Barge and have done since we applied to the scheme. So how does that come under extraordinary holiday cottages? Well to put it simply, if we didn’t give you extra, we wouldn’t get them! I think of our Five Star reviews as the place where our guests give us the thumbs up, and the Visit England Gold Standard Awards as our industry regulators doing the same.

Social Media

This is a big favourite of mine. Having fun on social media, NOT selling to you. Social media may not be your thing and that’s fine. Personally, I get really frustrated when people just use it to sell their products or services. Yes we run ads on there, and we do get business from it, but I’m talking about organic social media activity. The posts. And this is where I just have fun. I post as much as I can about Suffolk (and Tuscany now), nice places to go, yummy food and drink, that sort of thing. I like to post nice photos when I take them too. But I really like to have a laugh on there. And people like it! It’s so dull when all you see is businesses, especially small ones like mine, just telling you what discount they are offering or just showing you what they have to offer. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but I enjoy myself and a lot of people seem to like it, so I’ll keep doing that.

Woodfarm Merchandise

For years now we’ve given things away with our name on. We have dog-poop bag holders, which I think is the first thing that we gave away. As I’ve said, our biggest market is the dog-friendly one so this seemed like a good idea. And it was! We have given away thousands of these now. If you’re reading this and you don’t have one but would like one, just ask me. You can have one. Or if you are a previous guest and you’ve broken, lost, or worn yours out, give me a shout. I’ll send you another.

We’ve given away lovely mugs for years too, and again, thousands of homes have these. There have been several versions. First we had Woodfarm Barns. Then we had to get some with Woodfarm Barges on. Now we have both brands on one mug just to make life easier and to ‘cross-sell’ the brands.

Then we added our fabulous Woodfarm Travel Cups to try and do our bit to cut down on the use of single-use, or paper cups. These have gone down a storm and I personally use mine all the time!

We also introduced our double-sided Barges & Barns Trolley Coins in 2019 and they were an instant hit too! They make a great little key ring as well. 

Lastly (but not finally), guests can become part of the Woodfarm family with our specially designed custom sweatshirts! We do have to charge for these as they are a lot dearer, but we only charge what they cost us to buy and send to you. If you’d like one, do get in touch. They’re £30 each. 

Why do we do it? Because it spreads the word. Our brand is present in thousands of households and we get recognised. At the end of 2019 we heard from a guest who was using their Woodfarm Travel Cup whilst wandering around a Christmas market in Germany, and they got approached by another guest who recognised the brand! As a marketeer and business owner, I loved that, and it sent shivers down my spine!

“Where everybody knows your name”

I’ve always thought of this as the ‘Cheers Factor’. Remember the TV theme tune that said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get away, where everybody knows your name”? We all love to feel that we are recognised and welcomed. It’s a basic human emotion. OK, I can’t guarantee I know all of your names anymore, but I’m pretty good with faces so if I seem like I remember you when you come back, it’s because I do. In the early days I’d associate returning guests with their favourite Barn, but I struggle to do that now because of the sheer numbers. But I really do have a knack of remembering people. And people like that.

FREE BREAK Competitions

This is an interesting one. We’ve given away a lot of FREE BREAKS now over many years. There isn’t a catch, we do it to promote the business. I do have to juggle the promotion versus giving away too much but hopefully I’ve got the balance right. I wrote extensively about this in a blog post in 2019; you can read that if you wish to. But it’s another example of extraordinary holiday cottages I think, as we don’t see many people doing it. Certainly not as regularly as we do! 

As I said, we have grown year on year since we started, and we have exceeded all the expectations that I set myself and for the business. We must be doing something right for that to happen. I think it boils down to this; I have never focussed on financial targets or making money. Genuinely. All I have ever done is to focus on attracting as many guests as I can, and making sure they have a wonderful stay, want to tell their family and friends, and they want to come back. That’s it folks. It is a very simple philosophy:

Stay. Relax. Share. Repeat. 

Extraordinary holiday cottages in Tuscany

Hopefully our forthcoming Holiday Cottage in Tuscany will be the start of great things. Although we only have one in the pipeline as I write this, we have had a LOT of interest in the progress of the renovation. And the feedback we are getting is that people are interested because it’ll be a Woodfarm Cottage. They know what to expect. We are spending a LOT of money on it to make it extraordinary, and we already have a great colleague out there who will look after you in the Woodfarm way!

I think other than getting the accommodation right, ultimately it comes down to providing great customer service, which is not difficult! Hopefully you’ll agree that we are doing everything we can to give you extraordinary holiday cottages!

Our Tuscan Holiday Cottage is under way. It looks like a building site but then again, it is! Just thought I’d put an update together as I’m over for meetings and checking on progress.

With a little bit of luck our Tuscan Holiday Cottage will be ready to open it’s doors to guests around Easter 2020. So far the builders have taken up crumbly concrete floors and re-laid nice and level, put all the ducting in for the electrician, plastered the kitchen and bathroom, and put RSJ’s in the cellars to hold the ceilings up, thus ensuring the whole lot doesn’t fall down!

Oh, and on top of that they’d made a real mess of the garden as there was a lot of junk to clear from the cellars before they could start work!

I haven’t really published photos of the interior of the house before as it just looked like an old, grotty, dated building. I know from years of renovating and development that a lot of people can’t envisage what something will look like if they are presented with ‘before’ photos, way before anything is finished.

I’ve now decided to share some photos of the progress of our Tuscan Holiday Cottage as I’d promised, because it is now very evident that this is not the finished article!

We all know that a renovation project starts from the bottom upwards. With three cellars, the first thing that needed to happen was for a whole bunch of RSJ’s to go in to make sure this old farm building doesn’t come crashing down around our ears!

Ok, so to the inside of the house itself. The floor was very old and crumbly, having not been laid very well originally. So all that had to come up, then a new concrete screed was laid, with a reinforcing mesh inside it. This is the lounge. I promise you it won’t stay pink and it won’t have that old wall heater! Your Tuscan Holiday Cottage will feature a modern air conditioning and heating system. Warm in the colder months and nice and cool in the Summer. And boy, will you need that!

There was originally a corridor from the dining room, with the bedroom, lounge and bathroom opening up off it but we’ve taken it out to provide much more light and space. You will have the most amazing views across the valley towards Lucca from these windows

Ok, let’s start imagining what it’s going to look like soon shall we? Well, I’ve just been tile shopping and am over the moon with what I’ve found! Throughout the house we will have these traditional terracotta floor tiles. They have a lovely texture to them and they are so typically Tuscan. They will be in every room, except the bathroom, which will have a gorgeous grey slate, to offset the white, bevelled wall tiles. I don’t have pics of these, but they look awesome and the quality as you’d imagine with the Italians, is just amazing. Mind you, so is the price!

I’m especially pleased with some wall tiles I’ve found for the kitchen of our Tuscan Holiday Cottage. These are crazy money but so worth it. I’ve just put a kidney on eBay to pay for them! They are just 7.5cm square each and we’ll have them running around the kitchen units as a splashback. The kitchen itself will feature some very old pieces that I’ve picked up at auctions and antiques showrooms back home in Suffolk. We will have an eclectic mix of traditional Tuscany, combined with a slice of Suffolk. I can’t wait to share it all with you!

We may go for fairly plain wall lighting in most of the rooms, with these natural plaster ones that you simply paint the same colour as the walls, though I’m also looking at some really cool copper and brass ones too! We’ll just be going with fresh, plain white walls for all the internal rooms and then we’ll make sure we have plenty of interest with lots of lamps, furniture, pictures and accessories to spice things up.

I do want to make a statement in the lounge though so will have something like these beautiful picture lights on the walls in there.

Whilst we are on the subject of lighting, we’ll probably have these beauties on the exterior walls;

Ok, I’m off for a meeting now with the builder, architect and project manager, so I hope this little update will start to give you a feel for what’s been happening and how things will start to take shape. I will share some news soon of the sort of furniture I’ve been buying for the house, but rest assured it’ll all feel very ‘Woodfarm’. And I know that’ll go down well with you, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this!

Arrivederci

Our Tuscan Holiday Cottage renovation is now properly underway, and should be ready for you to stay in Spring 2020!

Owning a Tuscan Holiday Cottage has been a dream of mine for many years, and finally I can see it happening!

As you may know from our previous posts, we have a Tuscan Holiday Cottage that you will be able to enjoy from 2020. You can read all about it in my launch Blog Post.

‘Trebbio’ will sleep 2-4 and has breathtaking views across the Garfagnana, which is the upper valley of the river Serchio, just 20 minutes North-West of Lucca. It’s just 45 minutes from Pisa, which is only a couple of hours from the UK. So now we have your staycation covered, as well as short breaks or holidays in Italy!

‘Trebbio’ forms part of a tiny hamlet near a tiny village called Piazza Di Brancoli, on a hillside overlooking the Garfagnana Valley towards Lucca. This is a hilly region, and ‘Trebbio’ is a ten minute drive up from the bottom of the valley.

As I write this in the middle of October 2019, the purpose of this post is to bring you an update on progress. The easiest way to describe the ‘journey’ so far is that it has been both interesting and challenging! I bought my little Tuscan Holiday Cottage for the location and its stunning views. It required a full renovation, which is nothing new to me having done this sort of thing for many years in England. But they work a little differently out there!

The legal side of things

The legal side of buying and renovating in Italy is very tight and the purchase was really efficient! I actually enjoyed the process; I viewed the property in November 2018 and did the equivalent of exchange of contracts just one month later, on my birthday in December, a week before Christmas. I hadn’t told any of the people that it was my birthday, so there was some confusion and head-scratching in the room when we were going through the contract and tying up dates!

Present with me at that meeting, I had my estate agent, an interpreter, the architect, the solicitor, a paralegal, and the vendor! You all sit around, go through the contract, iron out any queries and then sign it! Similarly at completion you have the same process, with the addition of a bank manager coming in to take a cheque from me to clear the outstanding vendor’s mortgage as part of the purchase price. They don’t trust anyone!

I then engaged the estate agent to act as project manager because I have to steer the ship over in the UK. The usual shenanigans then ensued, with getting quotes from three builders, which all took some considerable time as it is a very formal process. I ended with detailed quotes on an excel spreadsheet that they call a ‘Preventivo’. This is the foundation of the contract with the builder.

A stubborn Englishman

I shan’t bore you with all the details here, as my friends have all had that, but it has taken months of me making it very clear, that despite all efforts to the contrary, that I am not prepared to pay more than I should for any part of the work. I made it pretty apparent that I have renovated a lot of properties in the UK and that I was not some wealthy foreign developer with bottomless pockets. But this didn’t seem to have any impact.

Anyway, we finally agreed on things and engaged a builder, whose work I have seen, and it is excellent!

A well-meaning mate

In July I was moaning to my mate Steve over a curry that things were dragging on and on and that they want so much money for everything. They wanted €2,500 just to take the tiles up, which is not the most skilled of jobs on a renovation! Being retired and an all-round thoroughly decent egg, he said “I’ll go over and give you a hand if you like”.

A week later, the poor unsuspecting man was sat with his eyes wide open, looking like a rabbit in the headlights, on a Pisa-bound plane, regretting ever opening his mouth!

With suitcases packed full of knee pads, gloves, masks and goggles we got cracking. Literally!

Three days of smashing up floor and wall tiles in the full heat of the Italian Summer is quite tiring I can tell you! We got through about 5 or 6 litres of water each per day just to keep hydrated! We got a lot of cuts and bruises from flying tiles but I’ll spare you those photos!

At least we created a nice piece of modern art in the garden! I’ve had the Saatchi Gallery on the phone asking if we’d part with it but I’m holding out for a better price! Maybe I should approach the ‘Loo-uvre’? Sorry, couldn’t resist!

On our first night there, Sting was playing as part of the Lucca Festival. We tried to get tickets but it was completely sold out. However, we got the best seats right outside the nearest restaurant to the town square and listened to the whole set over dinner, watching Sting’s head bobbing up and down when we craned our necks! It’s quite an experience having dinner, whilst singing “Just a castaway, an island lost at sea-oh”, with a bunch of complete strangers!

You’d have thought that I could have called Sting for tickets as we are now neighbours. Mind you, his Tuscan house is a little grander than mine!

During our time there, we got adopted by a local cat who hung around every day to ‘help’. The only thing he helped us with was eating our lunch! We named him ‘Gordon’, in honour of our Sting experience.

After three days of toil and sweat (and the aforementioned blood) we had removed all the tiles, ready for the builders to begin their bit! As a reward on day four I let Steve have the afternoon off so I could show him around the area!

Roll on to the middle of October 2019, and more malarkey with overquoting on tiling as well as a few other things, we finally agreed everything. The builders started work on the Woodfarm Tuscan Holiday Cottage on Wednesday 9th October, just 8 months after I took ownership! I decided from the start to adopt a very Italian philosophy to the project in order to avoid unnecessary stress. Couple this with my determination not to pay over the odds for everything, it has certainly taken longer to get to this point than I’d anticipated! First world problems and all that!

Be a Woodfarm Tuscany VIP and hear about availability first!

Anyway, all being well, we should be able to open the doors for you in the Spring of 2020. I’ll have to keep popping over in the meantime to make sure it’s all going well for you. Not sure Steve will want to join me again in a hurry though!

If you’d like to be amongst the first to hear when we release availability, then sign up to our Tuscany VIP group.