WIFI and Wellies - Simply Staffordshire
About 10 years ago mum and I were both at places in our lives when we had begun to think about our dreams and hopes for our future working lives and how we would like to live.I was in my mid twenties, working in a very corporate pharmaceutical business and pretty miserable and uninspired. We had always had an environmental conscience as a family and the business I was in didn’t fill me with passion and enthusiasm. Time and time again I would sit in sales meetings daydreaming of what was really important to me - not the £3 million sales targets but the environment, my local Staffordshire countryside and community and my passion for local food, culture, crafts and business. Mum was having very similar feelings and we would often find ourselves in the garden (mum digging, me chopsing) discussing the options and how we would want to live. Sustainability played a big part in our discussions and green issues were always at the fore (mum was digging an organic garden you understand!)
Jump forward 10 years and I have 2 small boys and I no longer work in that corporate world and so I had managed half my goal! Those ideas and feelings had never gone away and I had been doing some freelance work for a green parenting charity that had re ignited my passions. Our childhood family home just had mum now and the smaller house next door was coming up for sale and suddenly mum and I started to have great waves of ideas and excitement, almost compulsion, to make something happen. The idea was simple – buy next door for mum and let Rowan House as a holiday house – easy! Mmmmmm. What wasn’t so easy was the fact that next door was uninhabitable and if we were going to catch the new holiday season of 2006, we were going to have several mountains to climb. So in moved attractive draughty caravan for mum next door, out went old family furniture to shed and garage and out came the paint brushes.
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We worked like frantic, if not slightly demented bees sprucing up Rowan House for Easter. Marketing, business plans, star ratings, price lists etc were somewhere in the back of our overloaded minds – all we knew was that it had to be somewhere we were proud of and that we would stay in. It was spotless, homely and had lots of extra touches – 400 count white Egyptian sheets, all locally sourced furniture, soft furnishing, beautiful local crockery, fabulously kitted out kitchen and the most made of the much loved and tended organic garden looking over the fields. Easter 2006 arrived and we were ready but there wasn’t a guest in sight! We put a B and B sign up at the last minute and filled up the house, cooking organic breakfasts, home made bread and jam. We hadn’t fully appreciated that the white sheets would be quite so soul destroying to iron, but once we had pulled out our own eye balls a few times we got the hang of it. We booked an inspection from the Tourist Board who had been spectacularly unhelpful thus far and I felt about 12 years old and very much in trouble as I showed Judith Chalmers’ twin (minus smile) around – she did turn out to be very nice actually! A couple of, what seemed like, decades later we got our 4 stars and felt Simply Staffordshire had arrived.
The summer had meanwhile, arrived, as did the guests and our first attempt at a website. What also had arrived were lots of horrible chemical cleaners and lots of waste from our visitors. Mum and I could barely stomach sifting through other peoples bin bags for recycling and waste, I once found a whole Stilton in the bin and if it hadn’t been covered in old baked beans I would have retrieved it for my family! We felt we had to come clean about our beliefs and passion for the environment. To be honest, we were nervous that it would put guests off if we were to ask them to recycle and not bring their cleaners from home. After a little while and lots of discussion, we decided to come out of our green closet and declare ourselves to be passionate about Staffordshire and the environment and ask our guests to join us. We put together a folder for the house describing the measures we had taken to support the local environment and economy. How we had only bought things for the house from local independent business and how we had bought crockery from the last Stoke based pottery not out sourcing to China. We talked about our use of a green ISP for the website, all the eco bulbs and loo hippos in use in the house etc and these were amongst a long and ever growing list of environmental measures that we take. The deal was that we did all that and provided recycling and composting facilities, all their eco cleaning products and a lovely welcome pack of Fair Trade teas and coffee, local milk and home made cake and then they recycled and didn’t bring their own chemicals and just loved Staffordshire!
So here we are in spring 2008. We are fully committed to being as green as we can be and we are always looking at ways of improving our environmental credentials and yet, we hope, we are slightly less green around the gills. We have won our first award for sustainable tourism at the Staffordshire Green Awards 2007 and we have had a fantastically positive response from our guests and our community. We are now listed with Responsible Travel, Organic Holidays and Green Union (a green wedding directory) and are going for our EQM for the Peak District. We continue to network extensively with our local community allowing us to provide local food, activities and products to our guests. We look to improve the service we provide all the time with one eye firmly on developing the business to bring more people to Staffordshire in a sustainable way. We feel we are sharing our much loved home and county with our visitors while hopefully minimising the negative impacts that that visit might have.
And so to finish this little chapter…a few weeks ago while doing some rare sorting out in my own home I came across a notebook that I used to keep in the glove compartment of my posh corporate car over 10 years ago. Inside I used to poor out my ideas and hopes for the future, quite often in tears in some lay by feeling so frustrated with my lot. Inside I found a detailed outline of an eco bed and breakfast I would run. I had included mini business plans and drawings of the gardens. It was planned to be in Staffordshire and have beautiful white bedding and organic garden flowers in the bedrooms. I had detailed the organic breakfasts, the environmental responsibility, the warm homely welcome and the home made cakes. I had hoped that I might be out of the rat race, maybe with some children and that I would be earning a living from this sustaining and rewarding business. I sat on the bottom of the stairs speechless and a little tearful at this forgotten little note book with its forgotten ideas – or maybe not as forgotten as I had thought….
by Emily Whitehead (the owner of Rowan House)
See Simply Staffordshire for more information and if you're interested in booking a gorgeous holiday cottage to sleep 8.
Tel 01889 591844
Gold Gilt Winners Staffordshire Green Awards 2007
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