The brief for a holiday let sits in a strange place. The property has to operate like hospitality. Consistent. Professional. Photogenic. Robust. It also has to feel like somewhere you have arrived, rather than somewhere you have booked. A great holiday let interior gets that balance right invisibly. A bad one shows the seams.
This is a tour of the calls we make at Studio AROS on holiday let interior design projects, and the small things that turn a property into one that books, repeats and holds its nightly rate.
Two guests, both real
The room you walk into on a Friday night with one other person should feel cocooned. The same room, on Saturday with eight, should feel comfortably hosted. Most failed holiday lets are designed for one of those scenarios and not the other. The good ones are designed for both.
Hospitality grade thinking, dressed as a private home.
Storage where housekeepers actually need it
Holiday let interior design lives or dies on operations. The cleaner who turns the property over each week is the person who decides, week after week, whether it looks the way it should. Linen needs to be on the right floor. Cleaning kit needs an obvious home. There needs to be a place for the wet towels guests leave behind, and it can’t be the place they take a photograph of.
Robust upholstery, but not contract grade
Contract upholstery, the kind used in airport lounges, survives the wear but reads as commercial in person. The middle ground is heavier weights of natural fibre. Thick wools. Dense linens. Bouclés. Use them on the pieces that take real use, then put one or two pieces in something softer you wouldn’t find in a corporate lounge. The room reads warm. The upholstery still survives.
Lighting the listing photo and the evening
A holiday let is photographed at 11am for the listing and lived in at 9pm by the guest. The lighting has to do both. We layer four sources almost everywhere. A low table lamp on a five amp circuit. A task layer over the kitchen and the reading nooks. An architectural wash. One feature piece. A single overhead pendant at central rose is usually a tell that the lighting wasn’t designed.
The boot room as a five star feature
It sounds counter intuitive, but the boot room is one of the strongest moves on a coastal holiday let. Guests arriving with kids and a dog after a four hour drive make their mind up about a property in their first ten minutes. A generous, well lit boot room, with a tap, hooks, a bench and a tile floor, lands harder than another inch of marble in the bathroom.
Beds, mattresses, sheets, blackout
The single most consistent thing we hear from holiday let owners about reviews: the bed is what gets remembered. Mattress quality. Properly weighted bed linen. Blackout that actually blacks out. Soundproofing that lets a couple sleep when there are children in the next room. None of it is glamorous to specify. All of it shows up in the reviews, and therefore in the rate.
One palette, organic, of the place
A holiday let needs a coherent voice. A single organic palette, warm, narrow and natural, turned gently toward the location, will do most of the work. Coastal interior design for a coastal let. A different organic palette for a Cotswold barn. Another again for an upland lodge. The palette is the thing that, photographed across twenty rooms in a listing, makes the place feel designed rather than decorated.
Photographs that match the experience
The fastest way to a high return rate is for the property to be the same in person as in the photographs. We design with both in mind. The listing crops well. The listing doesn’t lie. Guests arrive having understood what they booked.
What this looks like as a project
For owners running a holiday let or a small portfolio we work two ways. Full design, where architecture, interiors and planning all sit under one roof, suits a coastal conversion or new build. Interiors led work suits an existing property. The Gower is a recent example of the former. A former B&B turned into three holiday apartments, designed and consented under one roof.
If you’re thinking about a holiday let, tell us about the property and we’ll come back with a short call.