Holiday homes can pay for themselves

At times of recession, owning a second home in the UK or abroad could be a financial step too far, but there are ingenious ways of making the figures stack up, giving you a summer retreat paid for by its investment potential.


This summer Chris and Claudine Stanton-Jones will be leaving their Twickenham home and heading for their rambling farmhouse in the South of France, up in the Languedoc and surrounded by medieval villages and fields of lavender.

They didn’t just get a good buy — they bought a huge old farmhouse for only £310,000 — they got builders in, fortunately with an English-speaking project manager, who divided the house into two separate semis with five bedrooms each. This means one half can be used for holiday lets, paying for the other half and all the Stanton-Jones’s overheads (ownersdirect.co.uk, ref: FR8329).

The couple, 48, bought the farmhouse in 2010. To get there, they fly from either Luton or Stansted to either Beziers or Carcassonne, which are both around 45 minutes’ drive from the house.

Running costs total about £1,200 a month, including mortgage, taxes and maintenance, and initially they planned to offset the expense by letting out the entire property. However, they swiftly found that they and their children, Jake, eight, and Yasmin, 10, wanted to be there at peak times — as did their paying guests, said Mr Stanton-Jones, a video games consultant, whose wife is a French tutor.

The cost of building in France turned out to be much higher than expected, at about £1,200 a square foot. Nonetheless, Mr Stanton-Jones is delighted with the venture. “This is a long-term investment for us, and I expect in five years or so we will see the house rise in value because of the work,” he says.

Away in Hungary

Catherine Dickens, 45, a direct descendant of Charles Dickens, wanted a holiday home and knew if she went outside the traditional western European areas she would get more for her money. She tips Hungary as an excellent option.

After a spell living and working in London, she moved to Budapest in 2001, where she and her husband Christopher Gore set up a property company and in 2007 decided to try their hand at building a holiday home.

They bought a two-acre plot about an hour’s drive from Budapest for £22,000 and have created a small, luxurious bolt hole that sleeps two in the heart of a peaceful vineyard.

The build cost just over £60,000, including all furnishings and the excavation of a cellar with a sophisticated rainwater-harvesting system. Without this the project would have cost about £40,000.

Solar panels provide 95 per cent of the power needed, so bills are minimal, and the couple estimate that if they rent out their house, Pippins, (pippins.uniquehomestays.com) it will pay for itself within seven years.

Now the family — Mr Gore has two children, Lucy, 19, and Johnny, 15, from a previous marriage, and the couple have a seven-year-old daughter Meg — use their cottage during school holidays, “when we always have great summer weather”.

... and back in the UK

Irene Douglas and her partner Roger Barker have made their second-home lifestyle work by spotting the potential of a derelict clapboard tea room, perched on Millook Beach in northern Cornwall.

They bought the one-room hut, plus 52 acres of surrounding land, for £55,000 in 1991 and used the building as a glorified beach hut to get away from their hectic lives in London, where both work in the film industry. In 2004 it was the location for a little-known Demi Moore thriller, Half Light. The film flopped but the fee was enough for the couple, who live in Camden Town, to upgrade the tea room, creating a gorgeous, romantic beach hut with a terrace overlooking the sea. The project cost about £40,000.

They often lend the tea room to friends but in 2008 they decided that their holiday home needed to start working for them. They registered it with Unique Home Stays and, despite measuring just 17ft by 30ft, it has proved a huge hit, renting from £1,120 for a three-night stay in low season (thebeachhut.uniquehomestays.com).

“It has been beyond our wildest dreams,” says Ms Douglas. “It is virtually 100 per cent booked, year-round. It is incredibly humble with no mod cons, but I think its unique position is the thing that appeals to people.”

Follies for sale

* There is a spectacularly pretty line of five lighthouse cottages on St Anne’s Head in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park on the market for £950,000, or individually for between £150,000 and £200,000 (coark.com). Refurbishment would cost about £50,000 per cottage.

* A Thirties water tower in the Essex village of Latchingdon comes with permission to convert it into a house, with the main concrete drum split into four bedrooms and a viewing platform. It is on the market for £250,000 (fennwright.co.uk).

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Top investment tips

* Buy in a tourist-friendly area with year-round attractions so you can make an income in every season.
* Make your accommodation flexible: two adjoining cottages with a linking door can be offered as either one large property or two smaller ones, which will appeal to a much wider range of potential paying guests.
* Buy unusual character property — water towers and windmills rent well.