The owners of Pitchford Hall, James and Rowena Colthurst, tell us all about the history of Pitchford Hall and their holiday letting journey with The Generals Quarters.
Situated in the beautiful county of Shrophire is the stunning thousand acre Pitchford Estate, which is home to what Country Life magazine called 'One of the most beautiful historic houses in the country, Pitchford Hall.
We sat down with the hall's ancestral owners Rowena and James who told us about the history of the house, how they sensitively restored the grade one listed building after it had been left empty for over 25 years and on the importance of opening their door to the public with their holiday let The Generals Quarters.
Can you tell us some history of how you came to be the owner of Pitchford Hall?
James
I'm James and my link to Pitchford goes back to 1991 when I first came up with Rowena and I just remember kind of falling in love with the place. We turned up here probably about just before dusk on a spring day, and I don't know if we went to bed that night as we just spent the whole time walking around the house and the grounds and I was just absolutely entranced by Pitchford.
Rowena
Very lovely to meet you, my name is Rowena and I was very lucky to grow up at Pitchford Hall and I'm the current owner with my husband James.
My mother, Caroline inherited Pitchford Hall from her stepfather in 1972. So I was very lucky to grow up in this idyllic house, and that was absolutely fantastic. And then, tragically, in 1992, my parents would be Floyd's of London names and they went bankrupt. So pretty much overnight they had to sell the house. It was a complete disaster and they sold it to a Kuwaiti princess. And so then, unfortunately, she never moved in and it was completely empty for 25 years. We spent 25 years trying to get the house back again and finally got it back in September 2016. And the whole idea was to bring it back to life. And so we did a whole kind of business plan: turn this into a holiday let's! Lloyds Bank agreed to lend us on the basis of the holiday let and that was the way we stared to bringing it back to life.
James
I remember Rowena’s parents telling her that they were going to have to sell it. She was going to have to leave the home that she'd been in for 20 years. I remember, all the bedrooms at Pitchford, they’re alphabetical so I remember going up to room A after this conversation with her parents. She was in absolute floods of tears saying that my parents are going to have to sell the house and they’re talking about moving to France.
I'm not sure it was that day or a few days later, but we went out to this lovely oak tree, about a few hundred meter's from where we are now. And we had a little coin that we buried in the oak tree and that was to kind of cement this kind of quest, that at some point in our lives we would seek to get the hall back and restore it and in a sense, I think we felt that we needed to right a wrong. The house hasn't been sold since it was built in 1549 and we felt the fact that it had been sold because of a number of circumstances which we didn't feel were quite right, we felt we needed to right that wrong.
Rowena
So I was 19 at university with James when we had to sell the house and I was so sad about it, but he decided to spring into action and he sent me to a lovely oak tree which is one of our favorite oak trees and we made a vow by the oak tree that we do everything we could to get the house back again. So that was our mission and we kept going for 25 years until we finally succeeded.
Did you have any experience of holiday letting before The General Quarters?
James
So we were very comfortable with holiday lets because we'd restored a barn called Windy Mundy Farm in 2000. I think we were in our late twenties and there was a derelict barn on the estate. The roof was almost entirely blown off and we just though we are either going to lose this barn or we are going to have to find the funding and then we can restore it. It just made perfect sense, it's a beautiful building, it's quite isolated, it's got the most beautiful views of the Shropshire hills so it felt to us that it would make the ideal holiday let.
So we did two more holiday lets after Windy Mundy Barn, Stockbatch Granary and Tree House Barn, so doing what we have now done with The General Quarters felt very natural. This has always been part of the plan and we've also stayed in historic holiday lets over the years and we love them and felt that it was very appropriate use, I love that you can stay in castles, towers and old Napoleonic forts that have been turned into holiday lets. It's now 2024 and I like to think that we've done an awful lot of good to the house since 2016.
Can you tell us about the Tree House?
Rowena
Oh, the tree has incredible say that it's a Tilia platyphyllos is the type of lime tree. It's got the widest girth of any lime tree of that type and the tree is listed and the tree house itself is black and white. They think it's from the probably the 1650s and the incredible thing is that Princess Victoria did a tour of the realm when she was about 13, and she came stay here for a few days because she was good friends with her daughter's hair at the time. And she used to love going up to the tree house and right smashing her diary and a little bit later on my my step grandmother, Lady Sybil grant,. She much preferred living up there and so she moved to the orange tree. And every morning the butler had to bring her a boiled egg on a silver salver up to the tree house.
James
Yeah, the tree house. I mean, It's a complete gem. It is the world's oldest tree house. It goes back to about 1660, 1670. It's got this really incredible kind of ornate plaster work, which was put in the 60s and Queen Victoria Visited it and stayed for around six or seven nights, in 1832. I always imagine her having a little tea party up there, I mean she was only thirteen and she was a princess at the time and living at the hall at the time were three girls of a similar age, so I imagine that she would be going up it no the branches of the tree party and having a tea party!
Why did you decide to open the house to the public in this way?
Rowena So one of the things we've done is we thought it was really important to open the house up again. So not only having the holiday let but we also do guided tours and what we call them restoration tours. And they've sort of seen the journey and we show them around the main rooms of that house, the great hall, the drawing room, the library and then we take them up to the tree house which they love. The orangery which they love and then they can have tea at the orangery at the end of the tour.
James
There's also one more factor that this house between 1992 and 2016 had been what I say aggressively kept closed. If anyone got near the hall, they get challenged. There were no guided tours or an events. There was no access to journalists, there was no access to academics, researchers and we felt it was important to open up the house and to be honest, bring some life back into that you know being there to be closed, no one stayed for 25 years. So you know it frustrated us that we couldn't get and look around the house and you know my sense is that, well I know that it frustrated certainly the local community who wanted this as part of a thriving local economy.
Can you tell us about the holiday let, The Generals Quarters?
Rowena
So really we've put the holiday let in the oldest, most lovely part with all the features and things and it sleeps 14 people. We spent quite a bit of time trying to work out where to put the kitchen, and all the different rooms, and they love the dining room which is obviously really important and all of the fire places have been restored and we've tried to make it as nice as possible in all the different bedrooms.
What kind of guests do you have staying at Pitchford?
Rowena
We've had such a variety of guests. We' get a lot of family gatherings I think because we're in the midlands it's perfect for family gatherings so you often find that it's an eightieth birthday party and everyone has shown up and people who have Christmas on different day come, and people just come very year because they like getting away with their friends and we've had people on wellness retreats and doing yoga nd those types of fitness type things I think it's the perfect place for big family gatherings.
JamesLast weekend we had a member of the Pitchford family staying on the holiday let and for a family with ancestry going back eight hundred to a thousand years, at this spot, how amazing for them to come and stay in a house that they can have access too!
Why did you choose to let your property with an agency?
Rowena
So together we were in a good position to try and buy Pitchford back and we had already been doing holiday lets back in 2000, so we had some other properties on the estate that sleep 16, 14 and 4 so we did have a bit of a track record already with the holiday lets.
I think working with Sykes has just been fantastic because of the expertise they have and the support and the marketing and so much of it is just reaching as big and audience as possible and making sure so many people know about Pitchford and just don't think we could do it without a really good agency to be honest.
James
I would never have considered not doing it with an agency. I think our first experience of talking to someone who was a holiday let owner who'd been through a similar experience to us, this was probably when we were about twenty three or twenty four, and he restored a barn in Norfolk and he was with an agency and his advice was unless you want to spent a huge amount of revenue on marketing then you should let with an agency.
Of course there is a commission arrangement but I could see from his advice that marketing Pitchford Hall and marketing the history of Pitchford just ourselves the marketing spend is just significant and i would not want to be doing that marketing spend without the help of an agency and I mean I would be talking about spending hundreds or thousands but an agency is spending millions and very cleverly as well. On social media advertising for example, and I just would not consider doing this without an agency, without a partnership.
The bookings side of it as well is fundamental, and having the support of the fully professional booking system where mistakes are not made and the support from and agency for things like just answering questions from health and safety to fire regulations or just general advice about the market. It never crossed our mind or if it did we shut the idea down very quickly, of not working with an agency.
Can you tell us about your experience working with Sykes Cottages?
Rowena
Sykes has by far been the best agency that we've ever come across. They really have helped us with out bookings but it's not just that, it's the expertise it's the support it's the whole network of different people that you can speak to and they are so responsive and I think the thing about Sykes is that they they really care about the customers and are really responsive and they are really helpful so you feel like you are i a partnership with people who care as much as you do about everything.
James
Everything I understand about Sykes, I think their advertising and marketing is really industry leading and I think that is really important even though we've got four holiday lets and we do have some experience with marketing, compared to what Sykes can do, their brand and the way they market on social media is really important. Without a doubt I would recommend then and a key point is that responsiveness, you know we are all busy people and when we send an email we want to know we are going to get a response and when we pick up the phone we want to know it's going to be answered. It's got to be quick when you're running a business and it is with Sykes.
Rowena
I think with the holiday lets the thing to focus on is trying to put yourself on to the mindset of guests and we spent some time staying in holiday lets ourselves to get an idea for what works and it's all about the quality and making sure that you are on top of the maintenance.
I think staying in a grade one listed Elizabethan house and staying in the oldest part of the house is quite special. Guests are in Shropshire which is one of the lovliest counties and it's close to Shrewsbury and Ludlow and the Shropshire hills, and it's know to be a particularly beautiful area and it's that unique experience of being able to stay in such a historic house.
What was the most challenging part of the restoration?
James
The most challenging issue for us that we are grade one listed so we have to be incredibly sensitive to any work that we do which moves this house from what it is to something more commercial in terms of a holiday let.
Rowena
With any grade one listed house you need to make sure you're working with the authorities and the only issues are certain things that you can't do, and you also have to do a lot of regulations and make sure everything is ship shape. It's mainly making sure that you are staying sensitive to the original features and working with what you've got.
What else makes Pitchford a unique place to visit?
Rowena
So we've got some very friendly ghosts at Pitchford! The first thing's I'd say is that the house has a really good aura and it's a really incredible, sacred space and it always has a really lovely atmosphere. We definitely do have some know ghosts. My son Edward and my daughter have definitely seen some ghosts! My step grandfather smoked very pungent cigars, from south America so you can sometimes get a whiff of that smoke. And there's a guy in a black cloak that Edward thinks looks like Darth Vader who appears sometimes. I've only ever smelt the smoke, I haven't actually seen a ghost myself.
What does the future hold for yourselves and Pitchford Hall?
James
The future of holiday letting for us, is this constant sense of do we expand, do we use other derelict barns on the estate? There are other buildings that could do with a bit of TLC to be brought up to the standard of a holiday let so for us it's just that constant questions of, we'd like to go further but how fast can we go?, and we live in a world of relatively high interest rates so we have an almost constant conversation with out bank manager and I've shown him around all of our buildings that we'd potentially push forward into holiday lets but it's just that conversation of can we fund it and can we get the revenue stats from Sykes for this and take it all forward.
Rowena
The holiday let is about the third of the house, and we live one third and the other third is still derelict. We'd love to, with Sykes help, turn the last third into a holiday let and give the guests more to play with there. We definitely have plenty of plans of how to move forward. I would just encourage people to come to Pitchford, it really needs people to come and see it and it thrives on people and activity and from having different characters appreciating it.
James
It's got to be sustainable. Every guided tour we have, we talk about how we can make sure we keep the house and make sure that it's done sustainably.
Rowena
There's so many mysteries at Pitchford and part of it is trying to make sense of it all! We would just encourage people to come to Shropshire and encourage people to come to a place like Pitchford Hall.
Charlotte Beautement, Holiday Let Content Writer
