On its website Graythwaite describes itself as ‘A private estate with refined holiday cottages’, ‘Luxury holiday cottages’.
The cottage had an unpleasant stale smell and the en-suite bathroom (both door and window closed on arrival) smelt damp and musty.
The interior photography is clever; mostly details of the rooms, which is deceptive and created a false impression of the true state of the accommodation. The cottage is basic at most, tired and shabby and definitely not luxurious or refined.
- The en-suite bathroom had NO hooks to hang towels and NO shelf/worktop to put toiletries. It's a large bathroom with space for a wide vanity unit with worktops either side of the sink. There seems to have been no investment in the details here or anywhere in the cottage.
- The kitchen tea towels were old and ‘greasy’.
- The fridge was sideways in a small room off the kitchen with the door opening the wrong way. It takes 5 mins to reposition appliances doors and if they could’ve been bothered it would make the fridge a lot easier to use.
- The bed was a standard double - too small for even 2 average sized adults!
- The sitting room curtain track hadn't been fixed properly to the rail and eventually fell down. My husband very kindly took the time to rethread the hooks and refit it to the rail. He does enough DIY at home, he doesn’t need to do more on his holiday!
There was a power cut and whilst this was not the fault of the estate, the information folder in the cottage stated that all cottages would be contacted/updated. We heard nothing and after a good 2 hours drove to the estate office for an update. They clearly hadn’t tried to find out the extent of the outage, just said they didn’t know all the cottages were affected. They were unsympathetic and offered no apology for the inconvenience.
Specific information about Eel House Cottage on the website describes it as ‘A beautiful British farmhouse’ with ‘a variety of footpaths’ and ‘walking trails from the cottage’.
Firstly, it’s a small cottage, not a farmhouse and it’s NOT beautiful.
And regarding the walking trails...I contacted the estate office to ask for details but the uninterested, unhelpful reply I received simply said “we don’t have any marked walks on the estate’. I did receive a welcome pack which had very little helpful information about walks, surprising considering there’s a large amount of accommodation on such a huge estate which will undoubtedly attract walkers. There was, however, a massive amount of information pushing the ‘experiences’ that you can PAY EXTRA for.
The Lake District is truly beautiful but our experience of Graythwaite was disappointing, and that’s an understatement.