Glorious Views And Elegant Comfort In One Of North Wales's Best Kept Secrets.

Bob and Barbara Ross at your service. We moved to Deganwy in 1988 to open a French country-style restaurant, which we ran here for over 15 years - Barbara being quite the Francophile and a natural in the kitchen. All the while we lived above the restaurant with our two children. Before that, we had been running a successful country pub near Corwen, having spent the previous decade farming in the hills above Ruthin. During that time, I played double-bass with the Merseysippi Jazz Band, which led to me jetting off regularly to America to perform in jazz festivals, with Barbara as my chief groupie. Since "retiring" in 2003, we have lived in the Languedoc in south-west France, in a succession of self-renovated cottages. It is an ideal location to indulge one of our other great passions: wine. Whenever we find a new and exciting wine, we ship it back over to the restaurant to sell exclusively.

We fell in love with Deganwy as soon as we spotted it. We were keen sailors with a boat restoration project in the offing. As such, Deganwy was ideally located for us on the river Conwy, an extremely popular area for skippers from all over the world. We also found that, having lived a rural existence for so long, Deganwy was a remarkably central location. It is less than an hour's driving distance from Liverpool, Chester, Portmeirion, Snowdonia and Beaumaris. We recently used our renovation skills to transform this waterfront-set family home into an extremely comfortable holiday flat for others to enjoy.

Like many properties from the same period, the rooms are very spacious. The décor is unobtrusive and designed to help you relax. The moment we both looked at each other and instantly decided to buy this place was when we first gazed through the living room window at the boat-filled river, over to Conwy castle with the mountain range of Snowdonia set clearly in the distance. We felt privileged to have had such a view on our doorstep for so long.