Five Acre Barn news

Well its almost been a year since the last Five Acre Barn post.  I realise that there are probably not many (any) people hanging on our every update…. but if you have a blog then I think that you are supposed to write something on a regular basis.

So here is a quick update.

Summer was incredibly busy – we had at least one guest staying with us every day from mid May to mid September.  This was our third summer and it is great to see ourselves getting busier with plenty of guests returning for repeat visits and others being the result of recommendations.  We have been lucky enough to get some very generous TripAdvisor and Google reviews which all help give potential guests the confidence to book.  We also joined the Alastair Sawday  platform with the aim of accessing the seemingly elusive week day market.

As in 2019 we hosted some of the talent from the Latitude Festival.  It’s a real novelty for us to meet people in the public eye and it’s even better when they turn out to be so lovely and appreciative.   Here is a photo of Colin from Mull Historical Society rehearsing his session with Bernard Butler.  How cool is that?

We have also hosted a few photo shoots – for Volvo and for local fashion label Lavenham.  Again it’s a real insight into a life that we have never had anything to do with in our past lives (I’m an accountant and Bruce was a Royal Navy Officer!).  Unfortunately for the Lavenham team it poured with rain throughout (very un-Suffolk) but they soldiered on.  Here they are in a huddle, capturing one of the models on the deck of room five.

We were offered an opportunity to be dressed and photographed in their (very cool) clothes but we decided that that really wouldn’t be a good idea!

We have also been lucky enough to have been featured in a couple of Interiors magazines – Country Living Modern Rustic and more recently House Beautiful.  It’s very flattering to think that we are worthy of being included.  It’s also fascinating to see how the professional photographers capture a room – hint always use natural light.  Unsurprisingly they don’t follow my approach of standing in a corner up against a wall as if I were an estate agent trying to make the room seem as large as possible.

In other news…. we continue to work hard on the garden.  The vegetable patch and gravel garden – some of the first areas we created – were wrestled back from the control of nettles and brambles.  They had fallen by the way side as our attention went elsewhere.  Of course it’s a constant battle but at least they don’t look as embarrassing as they did previously  The area in front of the guest bedrooms has been extended further (see our previous post on the stumpery) and planted with grasses.  It will need some time to mature as well as some additional planting (one guest with a drone showed us an aerial view of the area and it seemed to be a mass of earthy spaces from the air), but we are happy with the results so far.  Here’s a photo from the autumn on a rather dull day. 

I think that that is about all our news.  Watch this space if I can think of something vaguely interesting to say!