Anyone hired a big house over Christmas?

[Wimbledonwomble]

Thinking of doing this next year after yet another year of doing the same old thing (so everyone crammed into either mine or sister's house!).

I'm imagining big house in the country or by the sea no more than 3 hours from London with roaring fire, maybe a games room & hot tub or even an indoor pool. Local pub and places for a boxing day stroll. Would need to sleep between 10 & 13 and be wheelchair friendly for 3 or 4 nights.

Has anyone done such a thing? Did it live up to the romantic dream? Was the catering, shopping & transporting it all a pain? I'm guessing we'll need to start looking soon so any input welcome.....

Tia!

Maybe too far from London but Coastal Retreats have fabulous cottages in Northumberland, Yorkshire and Scotland. The spec is very high and you can get high quality local produce delivered to your cottage. I couldn’t afford to stay at Christmas time and wouldn’t be as many of us but if you all get on well are well organised and good communicators and between the group bring a few meals to save cooking from scratch or eating out every day could be good fun. Maybe try looking on Saw Days. Set up a WhatsApp group now between the organisers in the family do you all have some input on what facilities you want, areas, price etc etc from the outset.

have a look at the groupaccommodation.com website and bigholidayhouse.com website. we have used these sites a couple of times for this sort of thing. however, Christmas will easily book up a year in advance for really good places and it wont be a cheap time to go then either.

agree with Amazonion - before you do all the research etc make sure all of you agree on price, number of bedrooms etc. otherwise you will waste a lot of time searching and I would say you need to crack on now because lots of places do book out a year in advance.

We've done this loads of times and it can be great fun as long as everyone agrees everything up-front. As pp has said, make sure you agree about the cost, how you split the cost and the number of rooms people need. It is easy to say "oh, the teen cousins can just share" when that may be a recipe for disaster. Also, if you are the one doing the searching and booking make it very clear that everyone needs to pay x amount by x date and point out that all the shopping, cooking etc will be a shared responsibility and not just down to you as the original organiser.

As far as wheelchair accessibility goes, be very wary of accepting any claims that the place is accessible without double checking absolutely everything with the owner. Width of doors, turning circles, internal steps and the presence of gravel!!! We have a family member who is a wheelchair user and have been caught out before (lovely house but 6 steps up to the main entrance - luckily there was a back way in but it could have been a disaster). Conversely, don't dismiss places that do not explicitly state that they are accessible - we have often found that they can be just as suitable as long as you double check a few things first.

Hope you find something lovely.