Commercial Properties For Sale in Boscastle, Cornwall Guest house for sale Bottreaux House Bed & Breakfast, Boscastle, Cornwall, PL35 0BGProminent position in popular Cornish village. 8 en suite double letting bedrooms. Owner accommodation arranged over two floors. Residents lounge, dining room and bar. Trades March to October 4 The Bridge, Boscastle, PL35 0HE The premises comprise a retail unit with two floors of residential accommodation over. The property has slate roofs and slate hung upper elevations.The shop has a single display window to the front elevation overlooking the communal forecourt of the retail parade. There is an entrance door adjace...Sean and Morwenna Gee had it all worked out. Sell their flat in London, give up the day job (Sean worked for Sky TV), move to Cornwall, open a b & b. they had just had their first child and they were looking for a way of attaining a better quality of life. “I was prepared to work hard,” Sean says. “But I wanted to see more of my family.”

They couldn’t, they admit, afford to do it on their own. But in partnership with Morwenna’s Cornish parents, Frank and Kay Chapman, they bought Tolcarne House, a tired seaside hotel in Paradise (a hilltop corner of Boscastle, the once-flooded harbour village on the north Cornish coast). The raw material – a handsome Edwardian villa – had real potential (high ceilings, cast-iron fireplaces, glimpses of the Atlantic), but the interior was “old school” (doilies, pink frills, baby-blue wallpaper, antimacassars). “We bought the place fully furnished, but I don’t think we kept a single item apart from a set of croquet mallets,” Sean says. They spent £200,000 on turning the hotel’s eight cramped bedrooms into six groovy ones. Boscastle House, as it’s now called, blends period architraves and polished wood floors with chrome taps, claw-foot roll-tops, cool colours and solar power. The goal, Sean said in a 2008 website blog, was to “create an outstanding place to stay while enjoying an outstanding place to be”.

He didn’t blog again for another three months. “We’ve been finding out that there is more to b & b than just bed and breakfast,” he wrote. They were still painting one of the new bedrooms when their first guests arrived. So did it all go pear-shaped for the enterprising Gees? They are not one of those hapless couples who go into the hospitality trade with starry eyes and no business sense. Sean and Morwenna are made for this job. Rated as five-star, the revamped Boscastle House swiftly earned an Enjoy England Gold Award. By the second season, it was ranked as Cornwall’s number one b & b by online travel company Tripadvisor. “The first season was hard work, but by year two, we were going to the beach after breakfast, going for walks in the evenings – making time for ourselves,” Sean says. They enjoy the income, too. At the moment they prefer to tick along, but at full pelt – striving for full occupancy for, say, 55 per cent of the year – they could gross more than £100,000.

All going swimmingly then – except the Gees have just had baby number two (three-year-old Lamorna was joined by little brother Jowan earlier this month). And a toddler, a baby and up to 12 guests doesn’t make for an easy life. “Our own accommodation is pretty spacious as owners’ accommodation goes,” Sean says. buffalo handyman services“But with two children we are quickly going to outgrow our two bedrooms.” business for sale guildertonCould they not convert the house into a single-family home? handyman in san jose caNice idea, but the property is too big for the Gees – and, without the income, too costly to run. starting a handyman business in florida

So Boscastle House is on the market. The sales details state that the property could “revert to a grand private residence” (the previous owners sought permission for change of use, which still stands). But, according to Guy Morse of Cornish estate agency Lillicrap Chillcott, there is a healthy demand for this type of “lifestyle property”. carl's handyman service“I’ve always got a list of buyers looking for something like this, not just established businesses but homes with potential for conversion,” he says. business for sale umhlanga south africaAnd this one ticks all the boxes: contemporary-style period guesthouse, with home and garden, “fantastic location” close to traditional holiday hot spots. “These kind of properties have done very well in recent years,” Morse says. On a cautionary note, potential buyers should ask themselves whether they are cut out for this kind of life.

“People see it as a way of financing a large property but then they quickly discover they don’t actually like having strangers in their midst,” says David Weston, chief executive of the Bed and Breakfast Association (and author of How to Start and Run a B&B). “Owners also need to keep an immaculate home. Imagine all the tidying and tarting up required to get a house ready for a sale – and then imagine doing it every day.” They also need to deal with fire-risk assessments, health and hygiene issues, design and marketing. And, in the current climate, even the best of businesses can fail. Just 10 days ago, the Good Hotel Guide reported that three of its recommended hotels had gone into administration. Hotel insolvencies, they added, increased by more than 160 per cent last year. These were mostly larger properties; but Andy Lees, of commercial agent Graves Jenkins in Brighton, puts another fly in the ointment for wannabe b?&?bs, stressing the current difficulty of mortgaging business properties, particularly for inexperienced buyers.